Sapphire Designs 2016




On a crisp November morning A touch of winter filled the air With scents and sounds from yesteryear That made me wish I was still there In a poor, Kentucky kitchen When Mother and Lena were there And we hurriedly cooked the breakfast With nary a minute to spare Seven children with big appetites Had to eat before going to school It took a lot to fill the table With biscuits and gravy as a rule Fried eggs and grease-soaked bacon Adorned Mother's old, chipped platter Her big, blue gravy bowl held a gallon And the boon spean* parsed out the latter Some mornings, Mother made pancakes From commodity flour she had And boiled a big, hot kettle of homemade syrup From sugared water that wasn't half bad Familiar smells wafting through the house Brought the others into the kitchen We always depended on Mother For a breakfast with all the fixings But, some meals in that Appalachian home Were meager and too often sparse More than once, we went to school hungry A miner's pay could only stretch so far Those hard-rock times in Kentucky Helped me appreciate what I have now By not taking things for granted They made me stronger, somehow In my soul, there is still a yearning To linger in that long ago But my mind knows what my heart won't hear And all my wishing can't make it so Kathleen McCoy Eldridge © June 26, 2017 All Rights Reserved * This was Cheryl's pet name for the bean spoon.




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Mama Tried

Simple PastimesSapphire Designs 2016