Mary finally has something to hold over Emerson
Posted Mar 4, 2010 By Mary Cook
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Tweet ThisEMC Lifestyle - Mother said there was no such thing as boys or girls chores. So that is why my three brothers had their day in the kitchen and cleaning house, while Audrey and I worked in the barns with Father. None of us kids thought it was right, but Mother said we should all be familiar with any job on the farm, and that included inside the house, and outside in the barns.
Emerson lamented the loudest and longest. He said if the lads at the Northcote School ever saw him in a long white pinny apron, he could just move right out of the county! Although he didn't have the courage to ask them, he was positive the Thoms boys wouldn't know a roast pan from a flat iron. "Bet they never had to wash dishes, or peel potatoes," he lamented.
Well, all of that complaining cut no ice with Mother. She aimed to have her five children capable of any chore on the farm, inside the house, or out in the barns, by the time they were old enough to get married.
Because I was the youngest in the family, I was spared the very taxing jobs, like cleaning out the barns morning and night, but I was expected to milk a cow by the time I was seven. My sister Audrey could fill a pail with milk faster than Father, and it was nothing for her to climb up in the hay mow, and fork down hay into the cow byre, whereas all I wanted to do when I got up there was run from one pile to another and jump.
Although Mother oversaw the lunch making, we were all expected to take our turn. This is where Emerson's distaste for house chores surfaced the most. He hated making sandwiches with a passion. Mother would lay out meat loaf, or a heel of roast beef, and he was expected to do the rest.
I was surprised that Emerson didn't draw the whole procedure out on graph paper first, as he always did with any chance he got to get out his drawing pad and pencils. He slapped on the butter with a knife like he was spreading manure. Great globs of it clung to the bread, and then he would cut the meat so thick, it increased the size of the sandwich so that I could hardly bite into it.
The crowning glory came when the sandwich was put together, he would put his entire hand over the two slices of bread and bear down on it as if he was welding two pieces of steel. This caused the mustard or the butter to seep out, and what we ended up with was a soggy mess for a lunch.
These sandwiches weren't nearly as distasteful as the ones he made out of tomatoes. By the time he mashed the two slices of bread together, the sandwich was barely edible.
I was always delighted when Emerson's turn to make the lunches was over. Audrey made the best ones I thought, since she cut the sandwiches into four pieces, which certainly added a touch of class.
When it was her turn, Audrey would boil eggs the night before, we had egg salad sandwiches, which were my very favourite. Of course, as soon as you put that lunch on the table at the back of the school, everyone in the room knew you had brought egg salad sandwiches, because the smell over- ruled everything, including the drying out of the rubber boots and inner felt soles propped up against a log to dry at the stove. But I didn't care. They were my favourite lunch. Of course, there were always cookies or cake too. Very few of us had thermoses back then, so we had to content ourselves with water from the pump out in the school yard.
Emerson raised such a fuss over making the lunches, and the rest of us complained loud and long about the result, Mother finally assigned him to other house chores. He had to scrub pots and roasters, and help clean up the kitchen after supper. And of course, he had to wear the hateful long white pinny for the job.
I finally had something to hold over his head. Since his mission in life was to make mine miserable, when he tormented me to the point where I was ready to end his life, all I had to do was tell him I was going to tell everyone at the Northcote School he wore a long white pinny and did house chores. That sure changed his tune in a hurry.
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