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PatchWork |
Last Updated 06/20/05
Email: joy@our-town.com
Breakfast in the Kitchen
by Joyce Whitis
Sometimes, when I was growing up, Dad would cook breakfast. There was never any special reason for his taking to the kitchen. He didn’t wait until Mother was sick or anything, just ever now and then he decided to fry sausage, scramble eggs, make thicken gravy and cowboy coffee. He liked to get up really early, following a lifelong custom, and he liked to have everything ready to set out on the table and then wake us up with a shout of, “Breakfast is ready!”
Dad never tried biscuits though, so we had to make do with Mother’s cold leftovers until Ballard Biscuits, biscuits in a can, came along in the late ‘40’s, then he added hot biscuits to the morning menu.
After Dad called us to breakfast, I’d sit with Mother at the little kitchen table, covered with oilcloth, while Dad served up the food. I remember how much I enjoyed the warmth from the kitchen stove, and watching Dad place the round cakes of sausage on a platter that belonged to his mother, spoon up the eggs on a warm plate and pour black coffee into thick white mugs. Watching my Dad, sitting there with my Mother, I was wrapped in a warm blanket of peace and security.
There was little need for any conversation among the three of us as our thoughts covered the moment when the good hot food woke up our bodies to the cold day beyond the walls. The wind that eternally blows out of the north in west Texas, might rage around the corners of the house and shake the screen that covered the sleeping porch, but inside that kitchen we were safe and warm. That is a feeling that transcends the years and can come back anytime I call for it.
Our house was large by the standards at the time, three bedrooms, sleeping porch, large living room and a dining room that could be called “formal” but nothing was ever “formal” in our house. There was a wrap-around porch with a swing where Dad liked to sit on pleasant evenings, smoke from a Prince Albert hand-rolled cigarette floating across a yard that was testimony of my Mother’s green thumb. There were lots of comfortable chairs scattered along the porch and giant cedar trees guarding either side of the front walk.
When my parents bought the house, on the edge of Chillicothe, there was an outhouse in the backyard, next to a cow shed. Dad kept a cow there for awhile but tore down the outhouse and built a bathroom out of the east end of the back porch. There was a huge white porcelain tub on enormous claw feet that took awhile to fill with water. It was obviously made for a big man and my Dad was a big man.
The house was a very much “lived in” house with lots of overnight guests, both friends and relatives and when I was in high school, slumber parties. At Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, my parents’ birthdays, and other celebrations, my family and the families of my sisters and brother filled the house with laughter and occasional squabbling. Those were times to remember now that only a sister, and I are left.
With all the living that went on in that wonderful old white house with the white picket fence, I will forever remember that kitchen and a hot breakfast with Mother and Daddy and the wind raging outside.