Houses of the three Ogletree Girls

My mother and her four siblings grew up in this house "out in the country" amid peach and pecan orchards. They rode the "big yellow school bus" to school in Perry, Georgia.  On Sundays they drove into town to Perry Methodist Church.  Here's Carlene on our last road trip together before COVID:

Mimi's and Papa's funerals were here, seven years apart, Mildred and Earl Ogletree. They rarely missed a Sunday in their pew for seventy years! 

Once as a little girl, I was said to have talked too much and Mimi offered to take me outside.  "I stay to church with Papa," I replied. 

In their farming years, Mimi churned butter, gathered eggs, washed clothes in a bucket then hung them on a line, and made all the clothes for herself and her five children. 

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Listening to Carlene and Dot talking on the phone is, as it was when we were kids, hilarious--even if the eavesdropper doesn't have a clue what they're laughing about.  

I remember them sitting on the floor together in Dot's kitchen "antiquing" furniture with green paint and stains.  They laughed so hard all us kids went running to see what it was about, but our five or six faces only made them laugh harder. 

Dot, sorting afghans to give to her girls.
atop a handmade quilt in blues.

Recently, Dot chose to move to an Assisted Living Facility.  She's a lively and healthy almost-92, needs no assistance. But when her husband went into a nursing home, she decided that it was time to simplify her possessions and move to a smaller place.  

All four of her daughters live within driving distance, and she's happy there. 

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We all remember Mimi standing at the stove, making lunch or dinner for all of us--fried chicken, potato salad, butter beans, cornbread in a cast iron skillet.  I barely remember the original farm house, but I'd love to time travel back there, to compare it with my early memories.

"You sure are pretty, Susie," Papa told her every day.  

Here's Mimi cooking one of many big meals 
for us all--in her nineties

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Betty, Bob and I standing in front of our house-under-construction
on Ann Street in Cochran. 
Bob was smoking a pipe in those days. 

 

 A couple of years later, 1957, we're having supper
in the knotty pine kitchen, drinking iced tea,
pork chops, squash, and potatoes in plates
on a white table cloth

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         The houses and handiwork of the women of my family are inseparably connected to who each of them are in my mind, makers of home and meals, whose fingers guided yards and yards of fabric under the needles of their sewing machines.  Women who crocheted miles of yarn to make afghans.  Women who refinished and reupholstered furniture, who shelled butter beans and fried fish straight from the pond.