Arts, Crafts, Music, & Events of Breckinridge County Issue 2, July 2015 | Page 54

My grandmother, as did many other grandmas, boiled coffee
in a blue speckled coffee pot on top of a wood stove each
morning until that coffee was black as coal and could stand
up by itself. Their husbands usually had a special spot in the
garden where they dumped the coffee’s grounds each time in
order to make fishing worms supposedly live there for digging
next summer. Women, of my childhood time, washed
clothes in wringer washers and hung them outside no matter
the season. Often they would run or send us to hurry out to
retrieve the clothes from the line when it began to rain, and
often in the winter, the clothes would be frozen when
gathered. Most clothes and linens were starched and ironed
during those days. Moms and grandmothers had hundreds of
canning jars filled with vegetables, pickles, and jellies stored
on shelves to be eaten by the family until the next harvest.
Our dads, in our early