Ignoring the need to write........

It has been months since I have placed anything onto paper.  This is not entirely true, I have figured bills, written session notes and Sunday School lessons... I guess I am either a fiction writer or a liar. What I am trying to say is I have ignored the craft of writing.  The pure joy of taking whatever is running around in my brain and putting words in some organized fashion to get the thought out into the universe.  AHHH words!  

Another story from my Great Grandmother.   The year is about 1893.    

The Doctor

      Life had not been easy for the Boyt family.  Papa had been very sick.   He had been treated by a doctor, but the doctor could not save him.  When he died he was only 35.   This man who had hunted and fished to provide meat for his family was gone.  

     There was no money to pay the doctor.  So with a yard full of kids, Momma watched as the doctor came and took everything this widow with seven children to feed had except for two mules, a plow, a feather bed and an oil lamp.

     With the help of John and Henry, the Mother became the Father.  And Maude at the age of 12 became the Mother.  There would be no more formal school for her, there were too many babies to watch.  Eggs were gathered and bartered in town for the food they could not grow.  It was on one of these days when their Mother had gone to trade eggs for flour that this story takes place.

Chicken and Dumplings

     Now, you must remember that when Momma left there was a yard full of children.  And children, being as they are, have a way of getting into things that they shouldn't.  There really isn't anything new under the sun.  

     On this particular day, the children were running through the house and one of the boys ended up knocking the oil lamp off its high perch.   There it lay on the floor.  Busted.  Oh, the dread that filled these children.   They had so few earthly possessions and this being something as precious as light for the night, gone.  Busted.  They were sick.  

     How could they face their mother?  How could they have been so careless?  And as children are oft want to do, they contrived a story.  It went like this:  The old hen had gotten in the house and flew about knocking the lamp to the floor.  It was dreadful, this story, as they recounted their tale to their weary Mother.

     She went straight out to the yard and caught up this laying hen.  Wrung her neck.  Dressed her and put her in a pot.  Using some of the flour this bird had provided with her eggs, she made dumplings.  

     Here it would do the reader good to remember that meat had not been in their diet since Poppa died.  And chicken and dumplings under any other circumstances would have been a divine meal.  But this evening, as the widow and her seven children sat down to supper, hardly a whisper could be heard.  The children children choked down that poor innocent hen that their careless play and lie had doomed to die.