Keeping the House: Home
Lately, I’ve been thinking about Snap-Apple Night. When I was barely twenty-two, I was working as a living history interpreter at the Homeplace-1850 at Land Between the Lakes in Tennessee. Every day I dressed in costume (long dress, petticoat, frilly day cap, brogans) and, along with a pseudo family of other interpreters, lived out daily life on a working historic farm. I cooked on a wood stove in the “double pen” log house and learned to make a mean batch of buttermilk biscuits, while the men worked in the tobacco fields and waited for the sound of the dinner bell. That fall, I had just arrived and was still adjusting to life after college in Wisconsin. It wasn’t only the 1850 life that was different – Tennessee was like a different universe altogether at times. I still remember the man (my age) who, within minutes of meeting me and my pretty roommate, told us that he had everything he could want in life (pickup truck, trailer house, dog, rifle) save one: a wife. “And a wife can be hard to find,” he drawled, eying us up to see if he had a taker. I and my roommate, a college graduate from Indianapolis, raised our eyebrows at one another: could we possibly have heard that right?
(read more at the link above)
Posted by: maxine | November 1, 2007
