Southern Folks: I was raised to appreciate ‘country simple’

Bill Stamps

My family was poor when I was growing up. As poor as we were, living with my mother all those years back, we didn’t have it as bad as some of the Tennessee families I grew up around. My grandmother, Miz Lena, used to tell me, “Honey baby, count yore blessin’s. They’s a whole mess a people out there who don’t have nothin’ but prayers and theys love fer one another.”

I’ve spent the night with country kids who had no running water in their homes. They lived in houses set back from dirt roads with split-rail and barbed-wire fences stretched across their pastures. Mostly old wooden houses with tin roofs, beat-up mailboxes and front-porch swings. Inside, high ceilings, creaking wooden floors, big kitchens and blackened fireplaces.

The kind of homes that, during winter, you run from room to room closing the doors right behind you to keep the cold from following you. In the summer, the coolest you got was to stand in front of a floor fan that blew slightly less than warm air back at you. Either that or go skinny-dipping.

Families got their drinking water from a spring or pumped it up from a well. You had to give those well handles three or four primer cranks before the water poured out. There was plenty of it, but none to waste. Country people respect water. Without it, there’s no farm. Country simple.

There would be an oak bucket sitting on the table back in the kitchen with a dipper next to it. The dipper looked like a tin cup with a long handle, light blue-and-white speckled. Everybody used it. Dip down into that cool spring water and gulp the freshest and tastiest that God ever made.