I’d like to welcome my guest, Connie Clyburn, for the month of May. With summer fast approaching, I think you’ll enjoy Connie’s memories of gardening!

Most of my happy memories from childhood center around food. My family always celebrated good times with covered dishes full of homemade goodness, and even the sad times. Comfort food was our comfort, wrapping big ol mash potatoey arms around us like a warm, fluffy blanket.

My mom and her sisters learned to grow crops and make do with what they had available way before they thought of starting families. Southwest Virginia in the 1930s, 40s and 50s offered little else but learning while surviving the best way you could. That translated into knowing how to provide for a family by the time my cousins and I came along.

When I was born, my dad worked in a small locally owned grocery store. He found other odd jobs to keep us going until we had to sell out and move away just for him to find decent work. At one point we moved up to Pontiac, Michigan when the East Tennessee job well ran dry. We stayed a couple years until my mom, fed up with short summers that offered very little garden growing time due to winters that seemed to drag on forever, declared she was moving back home with me in tow. So, we packed up and moved back to Tennessee and garden growing country.

Mon was glad to get back to the warmer Tennessee weather and her sisters. Green beans and taters were usually the prize crops, as were tomatoes. Fresh onions and tender lettuce became “kilt” or wilted lettuce and onions. Combine that delicacy with a pot of soup beans —brown beans to those not familiar with Appalachian culture—and we had a meal fit for royalty.

When the garden crops were ready, the sisters would gather in each other’s kitchens to help can enough quart jars to last through the winter months to follow. I remember the pressure cookers jiggling in time to the happy conversations going on while we broke beans just outside the kitchen door. Working hard hoeing, weed pulling, tending a garden, and putting up food may not seem like much of a life, but we felt like the richest people around. Our tables were never empty. We also had all the extras like coconut cakes with thick icing flowing over floral melamine plate edges, homemade fruit salads, and fried apple pies.

Times back then sure seemed good, though we had our share of family tragedy along the way. We learned to get through it and keep moving on. We always leaned on the Lord and kept looking ahead. That foundation helped shape me into the person I am today. I guess you could say I’ve come full circle. I now live out in the country where I help my husband tend gardens on our small farm. Life truly is good.

Connie Clyburn 

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A bit about Connie…

Connie has been known to climb a mountainside for a story! She really did that as a news reporter in Kentucky when writing about a couple of mules used to haul pipeline into the mountains. When she’s not working on a writing project in her home office, you’ll find Connie out looking for the perfect photos to go with stories in her online magazine, ah law, y’all! or chasing sunsets at her backroad home.

Wisdom from the Doublewide: Finding the Laughter You Thought You’d Lost

Book Blurb: Wisdom from the Doublewide offers up a helping of stories sure to tickle your funny bone through humorous devotions sprinkled with a little country common sense anchored in scripture. Each story offers a buffet of sweet and savory delights to enjoy. You’ll feel like you’re at Mamaw’s house for Sunday supper again. Come along and fill your tank with wit and wisdom offered up from the doublewide point-of-view.

Purchase link: https://tinyurl.com/4mf454kf

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