Mama caught a rooster; she thought it was a duck. She put it on the table with his legs cocked up. I thought that was so-o-o-o funny!

In come the chillun, their cups in their hands, to get the likker from his yass, yass, yass. That old wind-up Victrola, up there in the attic, gave an eerie – nothing like church music – quality to her voice.

I was five years old, but I was a farmer’s daughter. I surely knew the difference between a rooster and a duck. “The things some people don’t know!” I thought.

Besides! The way she described the position of the rooster on his back; and the way the children were lined up to get the juices from the rooster’s body seemed like a snickering kind of “funny” . . . the kind where you put both hands over your mouth and part of your nose, and then laugh behind the barrier.

I’ve tried to find a re-issue of that old recording on the internet and have found a man singing it, but not a woman’s voice recording. It could never sound the same, anyway, without the contribution of that wind-up, (then slowly wind-down) Victrola.

If you are familiar with a recording of a woman singing that song, please let me know.

Actually, our attic was a great place to be. Mother would clean it frequently enough to keep down the spider population. Filled with quilting supplies, old furniture and old or out of season clothing, we could play dress-up and place our dolls into “real” cribs.

Also, there were comic books and children’s books brought by friends and relatives from Philadelphia . The attic was the perfect place for the books.

As my sister and I developed our reading skills, we would slip up to the attic to get beyond earshot of our parents. Finding some Charleston type jazz records that weren’t cracked, we placed them on the old Victrola’s turntable and settled into some serious comic book or regular storybook reading.

Photo of our farmhouse in the late Forties, after the general economy got a little better and fresh paint and window awnings could be afforded. The wind-up Victrola in the attic looked like this one found on a Google search.

The reading never lasted long. Always, there seemed to be something for us to do. Go get some wood from the woodpile. Go to the chicken house and get some eggs. Go to the barn and get some cracked corn to feed the chickens. Go to the garden and pull some onions or pick some peas. Take this bucket of no good tomatoes, cabbage leaves and potato peelings to the pigpen. Wait! Let me put this clabber (sour milk) in there, too. Pour it over the fence, into the trough; and don’t spill it on yourself. Go to the sweet potato house and get some sweet potatoes. Go to the cellar to get some white potatoes. As we got a little older: Go put the cow out to pasture. Go get the mail (a half-mile round trip walk to the highway.)” And so it went.

Why wouldn’t we slip up to those books in the attic as much as possible? What fun it was to play those old flapper-era 78rpm records left behind by our now married older sisters. Jazz, as fun music, began to settle into the background of my thoughts.

As teenagers, our older sisters had disliked leaving Philadelphia and no doubt found farm life absolutely not at all to their liking. As quickly as possible they “escaped” through marriage.

Why couldn’t they have talked our parents into staying in Philadelphia? Why couldn’t our parents have talked themselves into staying in Philadelphia? Factory life had such regular hours. Farm life was where the work never ended.

Mother birthed only one child in “The City”. She claimed she practically enjoyed the process, considering the attention of the visiting nurses. Her first three – two girls, then six years later, oh, boy! A boy! – were more than a handful at birthing time. In “The City”, after four years, a third girl was born. My father’s salary was regular; comforts and conveniences were available. Prenatal care and postnatal visiting nurses afforded my mother a taste of comfort and convenience. One year later, with the comparative ease of the fourth child’s good delivery and the helpful care giving of the visiting nurses, she was not immediately alarmed when she realized she was pregnant again.

As the pregnancy progressed, my father lost his job and the earlier escape from the farm to The City was reversed. Miners use canaries to be the indicators of dangerous air quality in the mines. When the canary dies, there is barely enough quality air to allow the miners to get out.

People like my parents were the proverbial canaries of industry. They were the most dispensable factory workers, the first to be pushed out of their nests. They moved back to the support of their family owned farms – their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. Thank goodness, their forefathers, from the Revolution on, had managed to purchase parcels of land from time to time and could sharecrop, rent or sell it to family members.

My parents returned to the farm in 1929 and I was born that December. They tell me I was born in a bed of holly. Apparently, my mother was busy making Christmas wreaths right up to the time of my delivery. Mortified that there was no money elsewhere to be had, she used her wreath money to pay the granny woman (midwife), and then continued making wreaths right there in the bed during her confinement.

They said I was fussy and had a red, pimpled face. Could that have been from the prickly holly? I cannot imagine any Jazz in my parents’ hearts at that time – just some stoic hymns.