About 20 Years Ago…

…I was raising my 2 little stair-step girls, who would’ve been around 7 and 8 years old, in Memphis, TN.  My husband Rory worked shift work at E.I. DuPont where he’d been for a number of years.
 
This was back in the day before DuPont went to the 12 hour shifts.  What a wild ride that was!  Back then the shift workers worked 7 nights of midnight shift, 2 days off; 7 nights of the so-called 4 PM-11 PM shift, 2 days off; and 5 days of the daytime shift with 4 days off following that.  Then it started all over again so that in the course of 1 month’s time he worked one week of each of the 3 different shifts.

I’m sure that some of the DuPont wives handled it better than I but I just did the best that I could and that was all that I could do.  I tried to keep a schedule in the house but this was hard to keep up.  I remember a friend calling about 9 o’clock one evening and was unable to hide her horror that I was just cooking supper. Often I’d hear the Valley of the Dolls theme song wafting through my mind, “Gotta get off…this merry-go-round…”  But those were happy days.  We were happy at our church (which is where I met Jean Stockdale whose blog I often mention here at the Cafe–this was before she started her MOM’s group ministry which she is so well known for now–go check her out).   We lived in a house I loved and I often said I would never move again although Rory often said he wanted to move to the country.  

A year or 2 later my husband’s widowed grandmother ‘eloped’ with a younger man, a cattle rancher…she was 80, he was 78, and they traipsed off to the Justice of the Peace one day and got married surprising us all.  He wished to get shed of the responsibilities of farming and offered to make us a deal if we’d buy his cattle.  He said he’d make us a deal we couldn’t refuse; so he did, and we didn’t.

Suddenly we were sitting on a 50 acre farm outside of Covington, TN with 42 head of cattle in the process of building our home with our own hands.  We fell in love with farm life instantly!  What a time that was!  The kids combed afar and afield, jumped ravines, swung on grapevines, played in creeks, played on hay bales…the kids had emu, goats, sheep, pigs, rabbits, a duck, a horse (who is STILL with us here on the farm though she is about 28 years old by our calculations!), 7 dogs, and 2 cats.

The kids are grown now but the grandsons love Avignon, our farm, and the saga continues with the chickens we now have for my grandson Micah’s lil’ egg business.

Quite a far place from where I sat in my city home and said I’d never move again…anybody interested in buyin’ farm fresh eggs from a 9 year old with big dancing eyes and a bad cow-lick?

 

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