January 27, 2005
Prairie Home
During the early 1930s economic rearrangement, we lived in a Larry McMurtry “Last Picture Show” kind of town in west Texas. Our neighborhood had dirt streets and yards. The back door of our house opened to what without much effort could be imagined as the south end of the northbound Great Plains.
My early morning chore was to remove and stash the tumbleweeds that had collected overnight, some as big as three feet in diameter. My father’s year-round work was somehow to hard scrabble a living for the four of us selling cigars out of his panel truck to the retail druggists and grocers in the “territory.”
My mother somehow managed, all the while sweeping sand, dusting grit, and washing clothes on a scrub board, mostly more cheerful than choreful. Sometimes, she would make home brew to interrupt the prairie monotony of it all. The smell of yeast would fill the house, and ever so often in the middle of the night, a bottle cap would blow off like a cherry bomb.
I was proud of my mother’s skill, so much so that one season I told about it to some of the neighbors, illustrating my story with the bottle caps. Unfortunately, my neighborliness did not sit all that well with my father. How was I to know that prohibition was very much then the law of the land and that how one attended to it had best be an altogether private matter?