Rural Memories, Good and "Less Than"

Margo Oxendine, Contributing Writer

Margo Oxendine

Since this column is called “Rural Living,” here’s my fondest memory of such a thing: Visiting Mrs. Brinkley’s farm near McClung.

We had just moved to Bath County from the “big city,” Arlington, Va. Everything was new to my sister and me. Truth be told, everything was new to my mother, a city girl born and bred, and my father, too.

We all learned about rural living together. And much of what we learned, we learned from Mrs. Virginia Brinkley.

She had a farm off of Route 39, and that is where we went to buy eggs, butter, pickles and any other wonderful thing Mrs. Brinkley might think to sell us. She had pigs and cows and chickens and lots and lots of kittens. She churned her own butter. I will never forget that butter and have never had better butter since. It

had a little flower pressed into the top, and came in a brick that weighed a pound.

If we were playing outside ― and we always were, at Mrs. Brinkley’s — and got thirsty, we’d get a drink from a big metal dipper in the spring house. That’s where the eggs and butter were kept until we showed up to buy them.

When we got to Mrs. Brinkley’s, we had to open the wooden gate. My sister and I fought over who got this honor: Hop out of the car, open the gate wide and, after Daddy drove through, close it carefully again.

Mrs. Brinkley had a very large, old brass bell on a pole in the yard. That was her “9-1-1” device. If she had trouble, she’d ring the bell and the neighbors would come running to help.

Mrs. Brinkley had a big old pump organ in her “parlor.” On the rare occasion she would invite my sister and me to spend the night, we got to play with that pump organ. We slept in a big four-poster bed. We had to go to the bathroom in a “chamber pot” under the bed. We learned to “hold it” until morning, when “the outhouse” suddenly looked good in comparison.

We loved to play with the kittens and the pigs.

Two horrible, unforgettable things happened at Mrs. Brinkley’s. One time when we arrived, one of the older cats was very sick with some dreaded cat disease. Out of our earshot, Mrs. Brinkley asked Daddy to shoot the cat. Believe me, that awful shot was not missed by my sister and me. We cried the rest of the day.

The other bad thing can be directly blamed on my sister and me. One day, we had an especially fun time playing with the pigs in their pen. We were not allowed to get in the pig pen. My sister did that once (I abhorred getting dirty), and the stench followed us for days, despite countless baths and laundry.

This day, we discovered that we could hold one of the long vegetable-like fronds that the pigs liked, just in front of their faces, and they would chase it around the pen, grunting. Around and around the pen we ran, teasing the pigs with the leafy frond. Such fun!

The next morning, Daddy came into our bedroom in his state police uniform. He was not smiling. “Did you girls play with the pigs at Mrs. Brinkley’s yesterday?”

“Oh, yeah. It was so much fun! They ran around and around!”

“Well, one of those pigs died from a heart attack,” he said.

We began to cry.

“And now I have to pay her for it!”

He was not happy. We felt very ashamed.

We thought we might then have a lot of bacon and ham, but that was not the case. If a poor, beleaguered pig is teased to death, you just don’t get bacon and ham. We may have had a hard time eating it, anyway.

It’s funny how this column-writing thing works. Seeing one word, like “dipper,” can bring back a flood of memories. Most of them are happy. Some of them are not. It’s a lot like life on the farm, I guess. Indeed, a lot like life in general. Remember the good and happy times with joy and delight. Feel guilty about bad things you did ― even 40 or 50 years afterward. And realize that, regardless of good times or bad, life goes on.

Cherish all the memories, and laugh about them if and when you can.