TheBanyanTree: Missing Those Declarations

[B Drummond]

As a boy one of the highlights of our family's often practiced habit of 
taking a "Sunday Drive" was a chance to visit odd and/or "unique" relatives.

As a boy Aunt Addie and Uncle Archie qualified as both. They also 
qualified as entertaining. Thus my fascination with them.

They lived "deep" in the Sandhills.  "Deep" afforded the privacy they 
desired. Well, at least Archie desired that privacy in that one of his 
means of income was slightly on the illegal side:  bottles of homemade 
corn liquor without a tax stamp attached.

Archie was a farmer who grew grain crops. Most of his grain was grown 
for feed. Some of it though he saved for "liquid" purposes.  They say he 
was born in and was buried in a pair of overalls.

His tractor made a great toy and I spent many an afternoon fiddling 
around on it.  He never complained when I left it out of gear, the 
throttle jammed up into  "Max", or the front wheels askew from 
pretending to drive it all over hell's half acre.  He was smart enough 
to not leave the key in it and that was sufficient to prevent chaos. 
"Young'us is borned with a 'nachal curiosity and a powerful good 
imagination," he'd say when my parents apologized for their son's rude 
behavior. Archie knew children well.

He didn't say much when he and Addie were together. Addie could talk 
enough for the both of them.  She was a woman of declarations.

Uncle Archie knowing children's curiosity and imagination so well, if he 
wanted to entertain my sisters and I he knew he could his best 
"entertainment" value from taking out his teeth.  My youngest sister, 
the baby, would always laugh and laugh.  I'd think it was a neat trick 
and wish I could "shock" my neighbors with my own set of false teeth. 
My middle sister wondered if it hurt to have all your teeth pulled and 
my oldest sister would just be repelled in horror.

"Arch, if you do that again, I declare I'm gonna' send you up Dry Creek 
without a paddle!," Aunt Addie would say with a smile on her face.  Then 
she'd roll her eyes back in her head and sigh. After a long pause, she'd 
look at us and say, "I do declare, I don't know who the bigger kid is in 
this h'ere house, the baby, or your Uncle Archie!"

Addie made the best chocolate layer cake that ever passed between two 
gums. Picture this: a chocolate cake had at least 7 thin layers with 
homemade chocolate cocoa icing layers between each cake layer as least 
as thick as each individual cake layer.  All this packed in a normal 
height cake.  There was enough sugary, chocolaty goodness there to make 
one swoon at first bite.

It was so good that it makes my mouth water at the thought of it now 
over 50 years later (and so "bad" for you that it should have been as 
illegal as Archie's moonshine) To be fortunate enough to eat a piece of 
it was the height of the trip.  And Addie always made sure we got a 
piece, with a glass of fresh, full-cream-in cow's milk to wash it down. 
  When we'd rave about her cake, she modestly say, "I declare, it aint 
all that. It's just a recipe that my momma showed me when I was a young'un."

Aunt Addie prided herself with keeping up with what the neighbors were 
up to (although she didn't want them to know a thing about what she and 
"Arch" were doing, of course)  And boy did she!  "That 14 year old 
Mayfield girl down Black Slough Road done went and got in a family 
way,"(she'd pause and then lean forward toward my mother and whisper the 
rest) "and word is the pappy is a 40 year old no-count down t'wixt Alta 
and Blountstown.  That's shameful and despicable, I do declare!"

She got her world news from "The Grit" and the radio.  They didn't have 
a television -- that "one-eyed demon of lust and falsehood that didn't 
belong in a proper family's house".

She was a world of knowledge on matters practical, weird, and trivial. 
She'd pepper most sentences with a "I declare / I do declare" for both 
emphasis and to denote things difficult to believe.   In the course of 
our afternoon visits she did a lot of declaring, that's for sure.  And 
she did it in such a loving, easy manner that you couldn't help but love 
her for it (that and her chocolate cake, that is)

In our cookie cutter USA today of "same speak" so influenced by that old 
one-eyed demon that she spoke of years ago, I so miss her uniqueness, 
her humor, her manner of speech that I loved to listen to as a child on 
those long Sunday drives.  She's gone now, of course, succumbed to 
cancer in her early 50s.

Now an adult, what I wouldn't give now for a taste of Archie's elixir. 
Was it as good as some said?  And what I wouldn't give for a generous 
slice of Aunt Addie's chocolate layer cake. Add to that a short spell of 
conversation around the fireplace, sitting in cowhide backed rockers, 
Aunt Addie spitting snuff in the fireplace expounding on the neighbor's 
sins, her unique view of life, and taking in her manifold declarations.

And who knows?  If it could all be possible again . . .

   maybe Archie would take his teeth out again too!