Aunt Bill Rambles
Ain’t this weather sompin’ else? I’ve see’d another sich summer as this right here on the mountain and if I rec-colleck right the year was 1936. Now I’ll have to go back a ways before I can git this story told.
In 1936 times wuz hard on Sand Mountain and two fellers from here went to Tuscaloosie to work at Bryce’s — that’s a hospital fer folks with problems. Whilst they’se there they met up with two women that would be their wives. Now the old saying goes “When you git Sand Mountain sand in yore shoes, you can’t stay away.” Well that was the way it wuz with these men — they come back home.
How this man on Sand Mountain and the woman in South Alabama made their plans I don’t know — there wuz very few telephones on Sand Mountain, but stamps wuz only three cents back then. Maybe they wrote letters.
The month was July when this woman come by train to Collinsville — about 12 or 15 miles from Geraldine. Now this feller didn’t have nair car, so he got his neighbor, with a old jalopy, to take him to Collinsville to get his girl and her trunk. Atter they got her they went on to Fort Payne (our county seat) fer a judge to marry ’em.
Me and my ma wuz at the house when they got to his mother’s house where they wuz gonna live. Now the weather was nippy and they had a roaring far in the farplace. When they come in this South Alabama woman was about to freeze — she had wore a voile dress to git married in and she’uz cold. As I look back on that I don’t see how that pore girl made it — there ain’t no house big enough fer two women. But she stayed hitched and they raised a family right there in that house with that kind of country living.
Old Saying: I don’t have no idee where it come from, but I do know there’s a heap of truth to it. Do yore givin’ while you’re a-livin’ and then you’ll be a-knowin where its a’goin.
Billie, I was born on July 30, of l936. My mother told the story that my Daddy built a fire in the fire place that night & they sat around it & ate watermelons. Never heard anyone else with a story about it being cold until your story. Which two brothers was it in your story? I probably knew them.