A wonderful little old lady gardener passed away last night. She was
responsible for my gardening disease. I had always thought that my grand
mammy had been the cause of my gardening bug, but apparently my Aunt
Pearline (or Seasortin' as the family called her by her nickname) was the
true culpret in the passing on of gardening maladies.

When I was first adopted by my mother and dad, I became part of my mother's
huge family, since she had ten brothers and sisters. Mother's oldest sister,
Pearling had moved back home when she left her abusive husband pregnant with
her only child. She remained in her parents house for the rest of their
lives, along with her baby brothers who came home from the Korean war and
never married themselves.

Every Friday my dad would get home, mother would have her overnight bag
packed along with mine, and we'd load up in the car, and drive to her
mother's and dad's house an hour away from Nashville in Shelbyville, which
is the Walking Horse Capital of Tennessee. We'd stay until Sunday afternoon,
and I grew up around my Aunt Pearling, Uncle Bross and Uncle Allen and Pap
and Mammy.

Being simple folk, they had always provided for their eleven children as
they were growing up, and that meant a serious garden to feed you. I learned
at a rather young age, and being the second oldest in their many grand
children how to dry peaches, apples, damson plums, and "leather britches
beans" every year. Mammy and Pearline canned alot during the summer, and
since Pealine had lived with them almost her whole life, she was domestic in
a huge way. Most all of her brother's and sisters lived within a 60 mile
radius or closer with exception to one brother who died while serving under
General Patton who was the oldest brother (Pearline was the oldest of their
11 children) and a younger brother who served first in Korea and then
Vietnam in 4 tours and decided to stay in Okanawa.

So it was five adults all the time to cook, garden, wash, clean up, as well
as all the rest of her brothers and sisters who had children and who lived
anywhere from 3 miles away to 23 miles away (one sister lived in Detroit, my
mom lived in NAshville).

There was ALWAYS a huge productive garden (they called a truck patch)
despite that the houses had less and less land on them. I remember as a
child when they lived on the farm. I remember sweet corn and fried corn and
moon and stars watermelon's put in the ice house for summer.

Then they moved to town into a huge house with an acre lot, and there was
tomato plants that grew up the clothes poles and along the clothes lines,
grapes that Pearline and Mammy made into jam, strawberries and rhubarb that
were put up into jams and the rhubarb pounded and cooked with sugar and
dried on wax paper into "Leathers" to be folded up and put in cheese cloth
and hung in the upstairs attic where Pearline's room aways was. Later that
would be cobbler for Sunday morning.

Leather britches beans were made from the first pole beans that grew the
largest beans. Mammy would come out and sit in her favorite rocking chair
and string beans on white cotton string, knotting the thread above each
bean, until she had two foot of strung beans, then she'd loop an end and
string them on the south wall of the side porch (their houses always had
wrap around porches that went all the way around) on ten penny nails until
they shriveled up and turned a slight gray. then they were taken down, put
into botton sacks and tied up and hung upstairs in the hot attic space until
dead winter.

All the fruit was either jammed, canned, dried or "leathered" and when
Pearline's sister came down each summer, she'd bring her crop of huge, sweet
plums from her trees in her back yard in the suburbs of Detroit and they'd
make plum jam and plum leathers for fried pies in winter.

There were five tomato's in the garden. Tommy toes which were tart and had
to be salted before popping them in your mouth. Huge slicers that you made
'mater sammiches with icy cold mayonaise on the homemade bread,or Pearline's
huge cats head biscuits.

Summer there was always 'maters to eat with every meal, and you only ate
fried green tomato's on special times and at the end of the summer. And only
if there were enough on the vine, and there usually were. Tomato's also were
twisted up in old newspaper at the end of the summer and put under beds to
be eaten until Thanksgiving breakfast. And tomato's were pickled as well as
preserved. There was always hand cranked rich ice cream and for treats, if
the summers were plentiful, it would be strawberry or rhubarb or peach or on
special occaisons, black raspberry.

Pearline and Mammy made watermelon rind preserves, and pear preserves, and
watermelon rind pickles, and from the spiney but never bitter cukes, they
made quart jars of rich, bread and butter pickles with sweet onions that
Mammy used the sweet onions she grew she'd gotten as sets from her brother
in Texas in 1924.

Pearline taught me how to braid onion leaves and hook them on nails upstairs
after they dried. And she taught me to coax a "doodle bug" out of the ground
with spit on dirt made into mud and dobbed on the end of a broom straw poked
into the "doodle bug's" hole. (that turned out to be a way to coax grubs up
from their holes, and the men used them to fish with) And how to make a lady
bug take off in flight...."lady bug lady bug, fly away home... your house is
on fire and your children's all alone" and she'd fly off. How to put chewed
up tobacco on bee and wasp stings and to pick mint and sneak it into the
pork stew when Mammy wasn't looking, and how much Pap loved it's taste
cooked with the pork.

Pearline always slipped in flowers in Mammy's garden. Huge headed marigolds
that now I know were Chippendale's and one she calle Old stink Frenchy,
whose marigold fragrance was so pungent, and the color was so butter yellow,
you knew where it grew in the dark. She claimed it drove the bugs away
though. Mum's that were the size of a newborn's head. Zinnia's that were as
tall as a 5 year old with every color of the rainbow and then some from all
the crossing they'd done over decades

.. Orange speckled tigers that sowed their daughters around their skirts, and
opium poppies that until Pearline called me up one hot sultry summer wanting
me to move her flowers to my house while they renovated the housing duplex
where she lived I was totally unaware of their magnificent color of
screaming hot pink and looking like raggedy mops or peony flowers. As a
child being at my grandparents house where Aunt Pearline lived I'd known
about the "pepper shaker plants" because as a bored child I'd see these tan
stems with round pods and little flat heads on top that I'd shake out the
seeds onto the ground and I had no idea they were Pearline's poppies. And
those were from seeds her Great Aunt Trib had gotten from Miz Cornelius
during the Civil War to grow for medicine. Pearline never learned how to
make medicine from them, she always grew them for their beauty.

And a peony that her Mammy had brought back as a root from her brother Az's
when Pearline was a toddler when she and Pap had walked and ridden in the
covered wagon to visit in San Antonio when he and his wife Hattie Mae had
lost a child. The peony was part of the plant Hattie had planted on her
baby's grave and Mammy had wrapped up a root of it and carried it back in
her apron all the way back to Tennessee and moved it whenever they moved
later on. The peony had gigantic white heads of flowers that had a deep red
near the throats and the buds would get larger than hen's eggs before they
burst open. Pap had made a ring for it with welded wired he'd talked the
blacksmith into putting across the wagon wheel when they scrapped out the
covered wagon in later years. It sat on iron feet that the blacksmith had
made into clawed feet, and it took two men to set it up over the peony in
later winter it weighed so much with the feet and legs. But those dinner
plate sized flower heads never broke or bent in torential rains the whole
time that peony ring was set up.

Pearline also loved her puff trees (mimosa), and her Mr. Lincoln rose bush
that she moved herself all three times they relocated and each time they
moved, the roots were larger and more huge and everyone always said when
they moved it, it always left behind a child to grow in it's place. She'd
never be able to dig the whole bush up and any root would grow into another
bush. These roses had such huge blooms that they'd make sachet's out of the
petals for winter and drawers along with the lilac blossoms.

There was also the bramble rose she grew at the back of the house that kept
kids away from the septic tank area, and around the out houses, grew "shit
house roses" which turned out to be Mock Oranges.

Huge stands of hollyhocks that were in six colors. And a flower she called a
Joseph's coat, which I still haven't found that was unbelievable, even to my
eyes as a child.

Pearline also was the main cook in the house, even though Mammy was the
woman of the house. By the time I came into the family, she was in her early
40's, her son was grown and had children of his own and she'd moved into the
main position of cook. Her mother still was her mammy, so what she said
went, but Pealine did most of the cooking. There was always huge, melt in
your mouth cat's head biscuits made from homemade "clabber milk" that
Pearline made every night in a glass gallon jar to cook with. Saving two
inches of the jar's milk, she'd use it as started and make up more before
going to bed and left it setting in the sink in the kitchen to "clabber up".

Fried peach pies, and special damson plum and apple raspberry were
constants. Cobblers too. Her cooking consisted of simple, but regular
Southern foods. Fried okra during the summer, squash and onion casserole or
fried baby squash. I also remember them growing cow peas, crowder peas,
black eye's, cranberry beans, wax beans, two kinds of pole beans,lima's and
a butterbean that was larger than a quarter from seeds Mammy had saved every
year since she'd married from her mama's garden.

They grew sweet taters, and two kinds of white taters, corn was boiled only
once during the season, the rest of the time it was fried in a huge black
iron skillet with butter and salt and pepper for an hour after the women
folk cut the corn off the cobs and scraped the milk from the remaining cob
into the skillets. They canned 20 or so gallon jars of that from the crops
the brothers and brother in law's brought them, and the last batch was
always the juciest and sweetest corn saved for the meal. She was the one who
taught me to slip some sweet corn scrapings into the cornbread.

She was the one we sat with at the children's table in HER kitchen GBSEG
and it was her apron that wiped tears out of our eyes from, or her big ol'
busom's that smothered you when she hugged you. She was "Ain't Pearline",
and her Pap called her SeaSortin' which to this day I don't have a clue why,
but he always gave nicknames to everyone.

Meals she made were easy to a childs eye just from the daily repetition..
Huge pieces of thick jowl bacon with country eggs that were so yellow and
rich, always biscuits, fried apples, flap jacks, corn cakes with hot maple
syrup or hot grape jam, country ham, red eye gravy and home made sausages
that her sister's husband provided them with every Novermber after hog
butchering.

The largest eggs from the chickens they had until the last house went for
scratch yellow cake, or special custard. Or Pearline's speciality, pineapple
upside down cake. So rich it made your teeth itch. Another speciality was
scratch coconut cake, but coconuts were seasonal and it would take several
days to prepare those. Pearline would knock holes in the brown hairy nuts,
save the water, and then first pop the flesh out from the shell, pare it of
it's brown covering, then shred it by hand into the coconut water to sit and
make rich milk. then she'd start building her cake. the last piece of
coconut she'd save for shredding, and it was so coconutty, and light your
eyes rolled back in your head.

There was also a tomato that Mammy grew with Pealine that had come from one
of the great Aunt's first truck patch and passed down by the women folk each
year there after because it was so large, it never cracked and had the best
flavor you ever tasted. It was the one you took the salt celler out to the
vines for. And one tomato fed two kids, or one hungry boy. Two would make a
pint of juice, but they were so good and so special they were usually the
ones they sliced for meals.

Pearline had Bizzy Lizzies under the tomato's, and Kiss me over the fence,
Kate which I think might have been an amaranth. But I can't remember the
plant other than the dark pink purple of it. Pearline also grew Cock's combs
that put you to shame they were so huge. Allen or Bross always had to help
stake them up to keep them from falling over top heavy. And Prince's
Feather? Lordy, they were as tall as we were for the longest time. Over four
foot!

Out back there always grew castor plants, and canna's she dug up every fall
and kept in bushel baskets in the root cellar with the eatin' apples,
potato's, carrots, turnips and other stuff. And she taught me to like raw
turnips but not cooked turnips. And to adore turnip greens cooked with some
smoked pork, a little pot liquor and a hunk of cornbread.

My mother would eat her cornbread with a glass of icy cold clabber milk for
her "dessert" many times. And I remember the sisters sitting on the porch
eating crackers and chocolate on warm nights laughing and talking about
their days growing up.

Pearline also grew musk melons, which are a fragrant kind of cantaloup in
this case. And these were from an old widder woman they'd helped out decades
ago and she'd shared seed with them of her mother in law's melons she'd
brought from the old country.

Pearline always put them in old women's silk hose that were unwearable,
tying them up on stakes to hang off the ground and get fat and sweet. With
exception to strawberries, any other berry was gathered in the wild.
Persimmon pudding was only for late fall, blackberry jams and cobblers,
black raspberry jams, she hated to grow cabbage because that meant they'd
have to put up sour kraut. But until the last house, I still remember her
and Mammy putting up crocks of sour kraut and burying them out in the back
yard or in the pasture going towards the out house. You had to remember
where they were and not disturb them. Sometimes they blew up if they weren't
done right. Pap went flying once when he stepped on one that wasn't cranked
down right.G

No my Aunt Pearline was as much a part of my life and growing up and
influence to me as my mother was. Probably more, since I was one of only two
grand daughters in this huge family of grand kids. Pearline taught me how to
save tomato seeds, and how to dry zinnia and maragolds for the next year and
put them up in hand made doll pillow cases. (That's what she called them,
they were just nice linen sacks that were just perfect for doll's pillows
LOL)

Pearline taught me to make biscuits, cornbread, how to dry fruit and make
fried pies. She taught me the daughters that fell from the stems of her
orange tigers could be lifted with a silver fork and planted 18 months after
they first fell if you wanted them somewhere else. She taught me to tie up
tomato's with old hose (women's, and it wasn't panty hose at the time) and
to slip a young musk melon into the largest stretched out one and knot and
hang off a tomato stake until it slipped off the stem. To "thunk"
watermelons and how to stretch out bizzie lizzies (those turned out to be
impatients) until they were so thick you couldn't see the edges of the
tomato patch.

She taught me patience as a butterfly landed on my hand or arm when we were
picking zinnia's until it flew off, and how to spot their "luggage" as she
called the crysalis (?sp?) and put it someplace safer if it were in the
wrong place.

She also taught me to hunt for milk weed to bring back to the garden and I
never gave it much thought, until I realized one of the reasons her gardens
always had more monarch and other butterflies than anyone elses, not only
because of the flowers, but because milk weed is home for the Monarch's and
others. Until the end, the last day I saw her we could talk about the
"pretties", the flowers. She loved them with a passion that rivals mine. We
talked about what I was going to plant this year in my flower beds and she
always spoke with a deep wistful voice of how she wished she could see my
flowers. The only time she came up here was the second year I lived here and
it was in magnificent awesome wonder. There were more flowers and varieties
she'd never seen before. It took us three hours to meet and look at every
flower that was blooming. It was peak time, it was May. By that time her
glasses were thick bottle caps and she'd peer really close and sigh and go
on and get all emotional about them.

She wept when she saw my daylilies, irises (she called them flags) and other
perennials she'd heard of some but never seen. Lady's lockets made her cry
(those were Bleeding hearts) she'd not seen since she was a child visiting
her Aunt Trib's house one spring. And she went home that day with toes of
daylilies, toes of irises, and hunks of this and that. Her face lit up when
she saw the blue purple spiderworts, and had to have some. I gave her my
last piece of true "buttercup" which is the double flowered creeping plant,
not the bulb, because she sat down on the ground to look at the tiny,
perfect shiny petals and told me they looked like the tinest waxed
chrysanthemum's only yellow.

She took ferns, whole rhizomes with feet, toes and next years shoots, and
the whole time I knew it was going full circle. By that time she lived with
her youngest sister and the husband (sister's husband) and was living the
retired life after decades of hard labor. She'd gone from wash boards, no
electricity, wood stoves, horse or mule and wagon, going into town to get
supplies to wringer washers, treddle machines and then an electric sewing
machine. I still have one precious quilt she made with Mammy as all of hers
from sixty years of quilting were sold at auction for $5 after Mammy died.

My Aunt Pearline would have been 92 next month had she made it to the day
she was born. She went before she could see the buttercups she always loved
and picked in great handful's to put in mason jars in the kitchen window,
and later the fragrant narcissus from the old homestead's she knew where
they grew. And even later to cut lilac branches to smell up half the house
with.

My fifty years were richer because of this amazing and incredible lady.

Thank you for letting me ramble on. My eyes are dry, but today for some
reason, I came home from work with a plant that I'd decided to call
"Pearline" only because I'd been thinking about her all day as I worked in
the greenhouse. It had been reduced for $20, a great leaved tropical thing
that I believe might be a dumb cane or some such. I still haven't found it
in my books as it had no name. When I got home, I was going to call my Aunt
Jean to see how she was doing, and Squire came out and somehow managed to
gently get the huge thing out of the car, and when I came inside, he was
standing there with this sad look on his face, and told me Pearline had
slipped away last night.

By the way, worked in the greenhouse? Yes, I got a job in the Lawn and
Garden/Greenhouse/Nursery section of my favorite Lowes store in Morristown
Saturday. I was saving the news until I knew I'd landed the job, but here it
is. If you don't hear from me at times, it's because I will be running my
ass off for other gardeners..........G

There will be other times, other writings, and more flower moments. Today I
quietly mourn the loss of a remarkable lady, but rejoice that she had a most
incredible 92 years. I will miss her greatly. This spring I will plant some
of her absolute favorites in my gardens just for her. Despite that she loved
them all, she still had her favorites and I know who they are.

Madgardener up on the cold and soaked ridge, back in fairy holler,
overlooking English Mountain in Eastern Tennessee zone 6b, Sunset zone 36

ohhhh.... Rest in Eternal Peace Mammy 2-17-03

Your memories can never die, Mad. She will be there in the spring
blossoms and dancing in the wind through the trees.





On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 20:10:44 -0500, "madgard"
wrote:

A wonderful little old lady gardener passed away last night. She was
responsible for my gardening disease. I had always thought that my grand
mammy had been the cause of my gardening bug, but apparently my Aunt
Pearline (or Seasortin' as the family called her by her nickname) was the
true culpret in the passing on of gardening maladies.

When I was first adopted by my mother and dad, I became part of my mother's
huge family, since she had ten brothers and sisters. Mother's oldest sister,
Pearling had moved back home when she left her abusive husband pregnant with
her only child. She remained in her parents house for the rest of their
lives, along with her baby brothers who came home from the Korean war and
never married themselves.

Every Friday my dad would get home, mother would have her overnight bag
packed along with mine, and we'd load up in the car, and drive to her
mother's and dad's house an hour away from Nashville in Shelbyville, which
is the Walking Horse Capital of Tennessee. We'd stay until Sunday afternoon,
and I grew up around my Aunt Pearling, Uncle Bross and Uncle Allen and Pap
and Mammy.

Being simple folk, they had always provided for their eleven children as
they were growing up, and that meant a serious garden to feed you. I learned
at a rather young age, and being the second oldest in their many grand
children how to dry peaches, apples, damson plums, and "leather britches
beans" every year. Mammy and Pearline canned alot during the summer, and
since Pealine had lived with them almost her whole life, she was domestic in
a huge way. Most all of her brother's and sisters lived within a 60 mile
radius or closer with exception to one brother who died while serving under
General Patton who was the oldest brother (Pearline was the oldest of their
11 children) and a younger brother who served first in Korea and then
Vietnam in 4 tours and decided to stay in Okanawa.

So it was five adults all the time to cook, garden, wash, clean up, as well
as all the rest of her brothers and sisters who had children and who lived
anywhere from 3 miles away to 23 miles away (one sister lived in Detroit, my
mom lived in NAshville).

There was ALWAYS a huge productive garden (they called a truck patch)
despite that the houses had less and less land on them. I remember as a
child when they lived on the farm. I remember sweet corn and fried corn and
moon and stars watermelon's put in the ice house for summer.

Then they moved to town into a huge house with an acre lot, and there was
tomato plants that grew up the clothes poles and along the clothes lines,
grapes that Pearline and Mammy made into jam, strawberries and rhubarb that
were put up into jams and the rhubarb pounded and cooked with sugar and
dried on wax paper into "Leathers" to be folded up and put in cheese cloth
and hung in the upstairs attic where Pearline's room aways was. Later that
would be cobbler for Sunday morning.

Leather britches beans were made from the first pole beans that grew the
largest beans. Mammy would come out and sit in her favorite rocking chair
and string beans on white cotton string, knotting the thread above each
bean, until she had two foot of strung beans, then she'd loop an end and
string them on the south wall of the side porch (their houses always had
wrap around porches that went all the way around) on ten penny nails until
they shriveled up and turned a slight gray. then they were taken down, put
into botton sacks and tied up and hung upstairs in the hot attic space until
dead winter.

All the fruit was either jammed, canned, dried or "leathered" and when
Pearline's sister came down each summer, she'd bring her crop of huge, sweet
plums from her trees in her back yard in the suburbs of Detroit and they'd
make plum jam and plum leathers for fried pies in winter.

There were five tomato's in the garden. Tommy toes which were tart and had
to be salted before popping them in your mouth. Huge slicers that you made
'mater sammiches with icy cold mayonaise on the homemade bread,or Pearline's
huge cats head biscuits.

Summer there was always 'maters to eat with every meal, and you only ate
fried green tomato's on special times and at the end of the summer. And only
if there were enough on the vine, and there usually were. Tomato's also were
twisted up in old newspaper at the end of the summer and put under beds to
be eaten until Thanksgiving breakfast. And tomato's were pickled as well as
preserved. There was always hand cranked rich ice cream and for treats, if
the summers were plentiful, it would be strawberry or rhubarb or peach or on
special occaisons, black raspberry.

Pearline and Mammy made watermelon rind preserves, and pear preserves, and
watermelon rind pickles, and from the spiney but never bitter cukes, they
made quart jars of rich, bread and butter pickles with sweet onions that
Mammy used the sweet onions she grew she'd gotten as sets from her brother
in Texas in 1924.

Pearline taught me how to braid onion leaves and hook them on nails upstairs
after they dried. And she taught me to coax a "doodle bug" out of the ground
with spit on dirt made into mud and dobbed on the end of a broom straw poked
into the "doodle bug's" hole. (that turned out to be a way to coax grubs up
from their holes, and the men used them to fish with) And how to make a lady
bug take off in flight...."lady bug lady bug, fly away home... your house is
on fire and your children's all alone" and she'd fly off. How to put chewed
up tobacco on bee and wasp stings and to pick mint and sneak it into the
pork stew when Mammy wasn't looking, and how much Pap loved it's taste
cooked with the pork.

Pearline always slipped in flowers in Mammy's garden. Huge headed marigolds
that now I know were Chippendale's and one she calle Old stink Frenchy,
whose marigold fragrance was so pungent, and the color was so butter yellow,
you knew where it grew in the dark. She claimed it drove the bugs away
though. Mum's that were the size of a newborn's head. Zinnia's that were as
tall as a 5 year old with every color of the rainbow and then some from all
the crossing they'd done over decades

. Orange speckled tigers that sowed their daughters around their skirts, and
opium poppies that until Pearline called me up one hot sultry summer wanting
me to move her flowers to my house while they renovated the housing duplex
where she lived I was totally unaware of their magnificent color of
screaming hot pink and looking like raggedy mops or peony flowers. As a
child being at my grandparents house where Aunt Pearline lived I'd known
about the "pepper shaker plants" because as a bored child I'd see these tan
stems with round pods and little flat heads on top that I'd shake out the
seeds onto the ground and I had no idea they were Pearline's poppies. And
those were from seeds her Great Aunt Trib had gotten from Miz Cornelius
during the Civil War to grow for medicine. Pearline never learned how to
make medicine from them, she always grew them for their beauty.

And a peony that her Mammy had brought back as a root from her brother Az's
when Pearline was a toddler when she and Pap had walked and ridden in the
covered wagon to visit in San Antonio when he and his wife Hattie Mae had
lost a child. The peony was part of the plant Hattie had planted on her
baby's grave and Mammy had wrapped up a root of it and carried it back in
her apron all the way back to Tennessee and moved it whenever they moved
later on. The peony had gigantic white heads of flowers that had a deep red
near the throats and the buds would get larger than hen's eggs before they
burst open. Pap had made a ring for it with welded wired he'd talked the
blacksmith into putting across the wagon wheel when they scrapped out the
covered wagon in later years. It sat on iron feet that the blacksmith had
made into clawed feet, and it took two men to set it up over the peony in
later winter it weighed so much with the feet and legs. But those dinner
plate sized flower heads never broke or bent in torential rains the whole
time that peony ring was set up.

Pearline also loved her puff trees (mimosa), and her Mr. Lincoln rose bush
that she moved herself all three times they relocated and each time they
moved, the roots were larger and more huge and everyone always said when
they moved it, it always left behind a child to grow in it's place. She'd
never be able to dig the whole bush up and any root would grow into another
bush. These roses had such huge blooms that they'd make sachet's out of the
petals for winter and drawers along with the lilac blossoms.

There was also the bramble rose she grew at the back of the house that kept
kids away from the septic tank area, and around the out houses, grew "shit
house roses" which turned out to be Mock Oranges.

Huge stands of hollyhocks that were in six colors. And a flower she called a
Joseph's coat, which I still haven't found that was unbelievable, even to my
eyes as a child.

Pearline also was the main cook in the house, even though Mammy was the
woman of the house. By the time I came into the family, she was in her early
40's, her son was grown and had children of his own and she'd moved into the
main position of cook. Her mother still was her mammy, so what she said
went, but Pealine did most of the cooking. There was always huge, melt in
your mouth cat's head biscuits made from homemade "clabber milk" that
Pearline made every night in a glass gallon jar to cook with. Saving two
inches of the jar's milk, she'd use it as started and make up more before
going to bed and left it setting in the sink in the kitchen to "clabber up".

Fried peach pies, and special damson plum and apple raspberry were
constants. Cobblers too. Her cooking consisted of simple, but regular
Southern foods. Fried okra during the summer, squash and onion casserole or
fried baby squash. I also remember them growing cow peas, crowder peas,
black eye's, cranberry beans, wax beans, two kinds of pole beans,lima's and
a butterbean that was larger than a quarter from seeds Mammy had saved every
year since she'd married from her mama's garden.

They grew sweet taters, and two kinds of white taters, corn was boiled only
once during the season, the rest of the time it was fried in a huge black
iron skillet with butter and salt and pepper for an hour after the women
folk cut the corn off the cobs and scraped the milk from the remaining cob
into the skillets. They canned 20 or so gallon jars of that from the crops
the brothers and brother in law's brought them, and the last batch was
always the juciest and sweetest corn saved for the meal. She was the one who
taught me to slip some sweet corn scrapings into the cornbread.

She was the one we sat with at the children's table in HER kitchen GBSEG
and it was her apron that wiped tears out of our eyes from, or her big ol'
busom's that smothered you when she hugged you. She was "Ain't Pearline",
and her Pap called her SeaSortin' which to this day I don't have a clue why,
but he always gave nicknames to everyone.

Meals she made were easy to a childs eye just from the daily repetition..
Huge pieces of thick jowl bacon with country eggs that were so yellow and
rich, always biscuits, fried apples, flap jacks, corn cakes with hot maple
syrup or hot grape jam, country ham, red eye gravy and home made sausages
that her sister's husband provided them with every Novermber after hog
butchering.

The largest eggs from the chickens they had until the last house went for
scratch yellow cake, or special custard. Or Pearline's speciality, pineapple
upside down cake. So rich it made your teeth itch. Another speciality was
scratch coconut cake, but coconuts were seasonal and it would take several
days to prepare those. Pearline would knock holes in the brown hairy nuts,
save the water, and then first pop the flesh out from the shell, pare it of
it's brown covering, then shred it by hand into the coconut water to sit and
make rich milk. then she'd start building her cake. the last piece of
coconut she'd save for shredding, and it was so coconutty, and light your
eyes rolled back in your head.

There was also a tomato that Mammy grew with Pealine that had come from one
of the great Aunt's first truck patch and passed down by the women folk each
year there after because it was so large, it never cracked and had the best
flavor you ever tasted. It was the one you took the salt celler out to the
vines for. And one tomato fed two kids, or one hungry boy. Two would make a
pint of juice, but they were so good and so special they were usually the
ones they sliced for meals.

Pearline had Bizzy Lizzies under the tomato's, and Kiss me over the fence,
Kate which I think might have been an amaranth. But I can't remember the
plant other than the dark pink purple of it. Pearline also grew Cock's combs
that put you to shame they were so huge. Allen or Bross always had to help
stake them up to keep them from falling over top heavy. And Prince's
Feather? Lordy, they were as tall as we were for the longest time. Over four
foot!

Out back there always grew castor plants, and canna's she dug up every fall
and kept in bushel baskets in the root cellar with the eatin' apples,
potato's, carrots, turnips and other stuff. And she taught me to like raw
turnips but not cooked turnips. And to adore turnip greens cooked with some
smoked pork, a little pot liquor and a hunk of cornbread.

My mother would eat her cornbread with a glass of icy cold clabber milk for
her "dessert" many times. And I remember the sisters sitting on the porch
eating crackers and chocolate on warm nights laughing and talking about
their days growing up.

Pearline also grew musk melons, which are a fragrant kind of cantaloup in
this case. And these were from an old widder woman they'd helped out decades
ago and she'd shared seed with them of her mother in law's melons she'd
brought from the old country.

Pearline always put them in old women's silk hose that were unwearable,
tying them up on stakes to hang off the ground and get fat and sweet. With
exception to strawberries, any other berry was gathered in the wild.
Persimmon pudding was only for late fall, blackberry jams and cobblers,
black raspberry jams, she hated to grow cabbage because that meant they'd
have to put up sour kraut. But until the last house, I still remember her
and Mammy putting up crocks of sour kraut and burying them out in the back
yard or in the pasture going towards the out house. You had to remember
where they were and not disturb them. Sometimes they blew up if they weren't
done right. Pap went flying once when he stepped on one that wasn't cranked
down right.G

No my Aunt Pearline was as much a part of my life and growing up and
influence to me as my mother was. Probably more, since I was one of only two
grand daughters in this huge family of grand kids. Pearline taught me how to
save tomato seeds, and how to dry zinnia and maragolds for the next year and
put them up in hand made doll pillow cases. (That's what she called them,
they were just nice linen sacks that were just perfect for doll's pillows
LOL)

Pearline taught me to make biscuits, cornbread, how to dry fruit and make
fried pies. She taught me the daughters that fell from the stems of her
orange tigers could be lifted with a silver fork and planted 18 months after
they first fell if you wanted them somewhere else. She taught me to tie up
tomato's with old hose (women's, and it wasn't panty hose at the time) and
to slip a young musk melon into the largest stretched out one and knot and
hang off a tomato stake until it slipped off the stem. To "thunk"
watermelons and how to stretch out bizzie lizzies (those turned out to be
impatients) until they were so thick you couldn't see the edges of the
tomato patch.

She taught me patience as a butterfly landed on my hand or arm when we were
picking zinnia's until it flew off, and how to spot their "luggage" as she
called the crysalis (?sp?) and put it someplace safer if it were in the
wrong place.

She also taught me to hunt for milk weed to bring back to the garden and I
never gave it much thought, until I realized one of the reasons her gardens
always had more monarch and other butterflies than anyone elses, not only
because of the flowers, but because milk weed is home for the Monarch's and
others. Until the end, the last day I saw her we could talk about the
"pretties", the flowers. She loved them with a passion that rivals mine. We
talked about what I was going to plant this year in my flower beds and she
always spoke with a deep wistful voice of how she wished she could see my
flowers. The only time she came up here was the second year I lived here and
it was in magnificent awesome wonder. There were more flowers and varieties
she'd never seen before. It took us three hours to meet and look at every
flower that was blooming. It was peak time, it was May. By that time her
glasses were thick bottle caps and she'd peer really close and sigh and go
on and get all emotional about them.

She wept when she saw my daylilies, irises (she called them flags) and other
perennials she'd heard of some but never seen. Lady's lockets made her cry
(those were Bleeding hearts) she'd not seen since she was a child visiting
her Aunt Trib's house one spring. And she went home that day with toes of
daylilies, toes of irises, and hunks of this and that. Her face lit up when
she saw the blue purple spiderworts, and had to have some. I gave her my
last piece of true "buttercup" which is the double flowered creeping plant,
not the bulb, because she sat down on the ground to look at the tiny,
perfect shiny petals and told me they looked like the tinest waxed
chrysanthemum's only yellow.

She took ferns, whole rhizomes with feet, toes and next years shoots, and
the whole time I knew it was going full circle. By that time she lived with
her youngest sister and the husband (sister's husband) and was living the
retired life after decades of hard labor. She'd gone from wash boards, no
electricity, wood stoves, horse or mule and wagon, going into town to get
supplies to wringer washers, treddle machines and then an electric sewing
machine. I still have one precious quilt she made with Mammy as all of hers
from sixty years of quilting were sold at auction for $5 after Mammy died.

My Aunt Pearline would have been 92 next month had she made it to the day
she was born. She went before she could see the buttercups she always loved
and picked in great handful's to put in mason jars in the kitchen window,
and later the fragrant narcissus from the old homestead's she knew where
they grew. And even later to cut lilac branches to smell up half the house
with.

My fifty years were richer because of this amazing and incredible lady.

Thank you for letting me ramble on. My eyes are dry, but today for some
reason, I came home from work with a plant that I'd decided to call
"Pearline" only because I'd been thinking about her all day as I worked in
the greenhouse. It had been reduced for $20, a great leaved tropical thing
that I believe might be a dumb cane or some such. I still haven't found it
in my books as it had no name. When I got home, I was going to call my Aunt
Jean to see how she was doing, and Squire came out and somehow managed to
gently get the huge thing out of the car, and when I came inside, he was
standing there with this sad look on his face, and told me Pearline had
slipped away last night.

By the way, worked in the greenhouse? Yes, I got a job in the Lawn and
Garden/Greenhouse/Nursery section of my favorite Lowes store in Morristown
Saturday. I was saving the news until I knew I'd landed the job, but here it
is. If you don't hear from me at times, it's because I will be running my
ass off for other gardeners..........G

There will be other times, other writings, and more flower moments. Today I
quietly mourn the loss of a remarkable lady, but rejoice that she had a most
incredible 92 years. I will miss her greatly. This spring I will plant some
of her absolute favorites in my gardens just for her. Despite that she loved
them all, she still had her favorites and I know who they are.

Madgardener up on the cold and soaked ridge, back in fairy holler,
overlooking English Mountain in Eastern Tennessee zone 6b, Sunset zone 36



·.·´¨ ¨)) -:¦:-
¸.·´ .·´¨¨))
jammer
((¸¸.·´ ..·´
-:¦:- ((¸¸

In article , "madgard"
wrote:

A wonderful little old lady gardener passed away last night. She was
responsible for my gardening disease. I had always thought that my grand
mammy had been the cause of my gardening bug, but apparently my Aunt
Pearline (or Seasortin' as the family called her by her nickname) was the
true culpret in the passing on of gardening maladies.

[clippity]

Shades of THE EGG & I, !!!
I hope you save all your more personal notes & posts so you revise them
into a book-length memoir before you follow Pearline. And maybe title that
many-chaptered memoir BACK IN FAIRY HOLLER.
Condolences 'n' all that.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 20:10:44 -0500, "madgard"
wrote:

A wonderful little old lady gardener passed away last night. She was
responsible for my gardening disease.

Maddie, I'm so sorry for your loss I wish I could find words to make
it easier for you. I'm sure she's smiling with satisfaction with the
first two lines you just wrote.

So sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing your wonderful memories.
They brought back a few for me.

--
See ya,
Mike

"It is never too late to become what you might have been." - George Eliot

you're more than welcome. I printed this out for my Aunt Jean and delivered
it today with old pictures my mother had in her dresser drawers (she's still
alive but living with my Aunt's oldest son and wife) and she wept and loved
it. I felt better since I had to work on her funeral being able to share
something really personal with her about her oldest sister. (she really was
like a mother to most of us, and especially Jean since Pearline was old
enough to be her mother by the time she was born)\madgardener
"MDC" wrote in message
...
So sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing your wonderful memories.
They brought back a few for me.

--
See ya,
Mike

"It is never too late to become what you might have been." - George Eliot