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Continued: She was never more than five feet tall before she started shrinking. She had dark hair which turned gray very early and flashing brown eyes. She was a "busty" little thing and though she was never overweight, she gave that impression. Always wore dresses that were too big for her, lace up shoes, cotton stockings, sun bonnet and apron. She had grown up the only girl in a family of boys and was sent home from the field to cook dinner (lunch) for the brood. She once was stirring a pot of stew over an open fire (which is the way everybody cooked in those days) and the family cat kept bothering her. She struck the cat with a poker and accidentally killed it. One of her uncles came by when she was taking the dead cat out of the house. He told her that cats had nine lives and if she had not killed them all the cat would come back and scratch her eyes out. She said she would run in and stir the stew and run back out and beat the cat some more. She considered herself to have been the original "liberated female". She had to do field work with the boys and go home at night to do house work, spin thread, weave cloth, etc. When she was in her teens she rebelled and told her father that if she had to do man's work all day, the men could learn to do "women's work" at night. Every one of her brothers could knit and cook a fine meal. Probably because she had so little education, she valued it highly for us. She often told me that she had inherited some money from her father's estate and that she never spent a penny of it. Despite the hard life she lived, she kept it in a bank for her children's education. The country school only went through ninth grade. If a child went on to high school, he/she had to board with a family in town. Only Uncle Howard actually got to high school (he only went one year) before the depression hit and the bank "crashed" with her money. Imagine my surprise when I learned it was the huge amount of $600.00. Apparently, that was considered a lot of money in her day. I was the first high school graduate in her family and she was as proud as could be. She sat in the audience sobbing with joy through the gradutation ceremony. Annie was a loving mother and grandma. Though she might take any one of us into the kitchen and give us a good talking-to if she thought we had done wrong, she was ready to fight any "outsider" who dared utter a word of criticism concerning us.
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