This past weekend, I made the trek home for Mother’s Day. I didn’t have much time to spend with my camera, my mom kept me too busy the entire visit. However, I did steal a few moments before I headed back to Wilmington to shoot a few sights of the homestead.
When my parents finished the house where my mom lives (yes, they built it…and when I say built, I mean they did the work. Not that they hired a contractor) they wanted a weather vane on the house. Their precocious little six year old knew how it should look. It needed to be a dog. Forty-two years later, I still love that weather vane!
When I was a kid my parents raised 2.5 acres of garden. There was corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers, beets, peanuts, potatoes (both sweet and Irish) and more much much more. It was hard work but good food. We not only ate well in the summer but we worked hard canning and being assured we could eat well in the winter. It is in vogue now to eat off the land, but for me it is reminiscent of my childhood. Of course the homestead had to have a rain barrel or two. We were green before ‘green’ was a household term.
How you knew it was time to eat or time to call it a day and come home.
An auto accident took my dad from us before his time. All these years later, I still sometimes think my dad should be in the barn working on some project or tinkering with something.
Love the article and the photos! Reminds me of my grandparents’ home in Victoria, Virginia, which my dad and his two brothers helped to build, and they had a garden about the size of your parents’ garden, plus chickens & hogs. My grandfather was a builder and tinner,as was his father, and in later years my dad installed tin roofs for several people, now a lost art. See ya on Saturday at Fort Fisher!
Thanks for the memories & tears. Not only did your parents build the house in Rural Hall they also hand built a house in West Virginia. Ate beans and biscuits every day in order to buy supplys for the house. What remarkable parents you had/have.
God Bless,
I love the entire family.