It was really down on the farm, because Grandma's 88 acre farm was on a bottom in New River gorge across from MacKendree hospital. Every summer the grandchildren would stay on the farm working and playing, eating like horses and sleeping like logs. We would hoe corn in the 8 acre field until noon until the women folk blew the conch shell to call us in for lunch (we called it dinner). Then we would hoe more corn until the conchshell called us in for dinner (we called it supper).
Then after supper we were on our own. We could get a water- melon from the 8 acre field and take it down on the river bank and eat it any time we wanted. W e could swim, take the boat for a ride on the river, or just play around on the sandbar. Some times at night we would sleep out on the sandbar under a wall that had washed up against a tree in one of the many floods we had then before Bluestone dam was built. We would take the boat in the morning and check the trot line between the upper and lower shoals for catfish. What catfish we found we took up and tied in the spring near the house and anytime we wanted fish for supper we would just go out to the spring and get some.
When we had a reunion on Grandma's birthday on the 4th of July, all the cousins would sleep in the "big room" on quilts on the floor. We wouldn't get to sleep until about midnight with all the talk and pillow fights, but when we did go to sleep we slept good.
Grandma had 13 children, all of the boys older than all of the girls. I don't remember my Grandad who died in 1926, the year I was born. The oldest son died in infancy, as did the youngest daughter. The only one still living is my Aunt Elsie at Inverness, Florida. My many cousins are scattered all over the United States.
Grandma finally had to sell the farm and move in with her youngest duaghter at Huntington. The old house has rotted down now and the 8 acre field is all grown up in locust trees; but the many memories of a happy childhood will live forever.