Way back in the "good ol' days" when we were kids, Mom and Dad took us to Grandma's every Sunday afternoon where the Ayers clan gathered. Surrounded by aunts, uncles, and cousins, we sat around the huge drop-leaf table and ate the delicious food my grandmother, Lonie, had spent the better part of the week preparing, while talking, and laughing, and generally having a wonderful time together.
Why, you ask, did it take my grandma days to prepare Sunday dinner for the family? Well because, as I've mentioned in previous blogs, my mother had nine siblings. So, if all the "locals" came for lunch, we numbered around 18-20, give or take. If all the "out-of-towners" were also visiting, that number went up to 30 or more. Either way, even with the huge table that could seat 10 (or 12 in a pinch), we had to eat in shifts.
Plates were filled from the heaping bowls of food on the table for the younger kids, who were relegated to a small card table in the den. Then the men were given first shot at the delicious food and fluffy homemade biscuits, while everything was still piping hot from the oven. Now you may think it a bit sexist for the women to stand by and serve while the men ate, but in actuality, this was a clever arrangement which suited both genders. The men ate their fill pretty rapidly and vacated the table to head outside, weather permitting, to find a comfortable place in the shade to nap (or to smoke or to take a little nip if a little nip was available, which it generally was.) Once the men were gone, the women took their places at the table, eating and talking (or occasionally gossiping) for as long as they wanted, only rising to clear, and wash-up, and put away once they had had their appetites, for food and fellowship, satisfied.
While our mothers sat at the dining room table and our fathers lounged around, the kids found many, many interesting things to do and places to explore. In the colder months, when the window panes would frost over from the combined warmth of the cooking and human beings packed inside, the upstairs bedrooms of my grandparents little clapboard house in Goodview might become a palace or a pirate ship, where we let our young imaginations run amok. In the summertime we broke out the croquet set or volleyball net and played for hours. Or we dragged out chairs and Grandma's homemade quilts and made a tent. Of course the younger cousins would invariably pull down a quilt or two each time they crawled in or out, so we spent the better part of the afternoon rebuilding that tent.
My cousin, Tim, who I always thought was somewhat less of a ruffian than my younger brother and most of my boy cousins, would get Grandma to give him a small sauce pan filled with an inch or so of water and one lone hot dog, which he would pretend to cook on one of the many floor furnace vents. Though the hot air blowing out from the old oil-fired furnace was quite toasty, as compared to that produced by today's heat pumps, Tim's hot dog never got any more that lukewarm. Nevertheless, he generally ate at least part of it before the afternoon was done.
At Eastertime, the older grandchildren hid eggs, that Grandma had colored, for the younger kids to find. Well, except for that year when Grandma forgot to boil the eggs before she colored them. Boy, was that a mess! After that year, we opted for the plastic eggs instead - you know the ones that can be filled with jelly beans, colored marshmallow eggs, or Peeps. Of course, that meant that hiding the eggs the first time was much more fun than the second or third rounds, after all the candy had been eaten, because the enthusiasm for finding the empty eggs flagged considerably. And then, months later, we'd come across a forgotten egg under a bush or in a clump of dead grass.
Sometimes the adults would confiscate the kids' card table and put it to the use for which it was intended - Rook! If you have never played Rook, or watched my grandfather play Rook, you've really missed a treat. It's a fun game of betting on how many points you think you'll be able to make to try and win the "widow" so you can choose which color of cards is "trumps," scoring bigtime if you are able to achieve your prediction, or being "set" bigtime if you fail. My grandfather, Lemuel James Ayers, Sr. or "Brud" liked to win a hand, or a game, but what he really loved was to set his opponent. I can still hear him crowing, yes crowing, when he was able to outplay my dad (always an audacious, risk-taking card player) and set him back the full amount of his original bid.
I spent many an afternoon sitting behind one of my aunts or uncles watching the Rook game. It was fascinating. Sometimes I would be allowed to hold the cards and, with some gently prompting, bid and play out the hand. A proud moment to be sure. To this day I still love to play cards, especially Rook, because it always takes me back to those wonderful afternoons with family in the little white house in Goodview.
