Sundays were for family visits

In this photograph from the very early 1950s, my father, James Vernon Dale Sr., is sitting with two of his sisters, Mildred on his left and Pansy on his right. Pansy's husband, Beauchamp (pronounced BOH-shahmp), is on the far right. I do not have the date of Mildred's birth. Pansy was born in 1895 and was 8 years older than my father. The photograph was taken in the living room of our house in Fairmount on a Sunday afternoon.

My father drove to Williamsburg to bring Aunt Mildred to Richmond for the visit. This get-together was planned, but it was not at all unusual for family members to visit unannounced on Sundays in the 1940s and 1950s. My father's sister Lorraine also visited us fairly often, as did my father's brother Gerald, who was then living in Gaithersburg, Md.

Our family also made regular visits to see my mother's younger sister Louise (who had a family of girls and whose husband, Frank Call, had worked for the railroad) near Chester in Chesterfield County - then a very rural area. We would also drive up Route 33 to visit my mother's older sister Annie and her second husband, Walter Gowin. Aunt Annie and Uncle Walter lived on a working farm adjacent to Scotchtown in rural Hanover County. Scotchtown was the home of Patrick Henry from 1771 to 1778, but it had not yet been restored by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. The two farms were ideal places for my sister and I to ramble and explore.

I have very pleasant memories of Sunday afternoons at my aunt's farm in Hanover. I recall one afternoon when my cousins, my sister and I made fresh peach ice cream under one of the two huge trees on the broad front lawn while at least a dozen Nichols grownups sat talking in the shade in chairs brought from the kitchen. My grandmother Nichols lived at the sprawling farm with her daughter and son-in-law after my grandfather died when I was 10, in 1952. She was a great cook all of her life and thought nothing of feeding Sunday dinner to a dozen or more each week. It also didn't matter to her that the kitchen in the farmhouse was dominated by a green, cast-iron wood-burning stove. She would test the temperature of the oven or the stove's surface with her bare hand and cook mashed potatoes, biscuits, country ham, fried chicken, green beans, fresh corn and fresh tomatoes - yes, all for one meal and all from scratch - and bake an apple pie or two for dessert.

The farmhouse - two stories, frame, square, painted white with dark-green trim and a front porch that ran the width of the house - also had a hand-crank party-line phone on the wall in the kitchen, an outhouse out back and a galvanized tub for Saturday-night baths next to the cast-iron stove. When they first moved in, there was no electricity. I remember one incident involving the outhouse clearly, and it must have been when I was staying at the farm for a few days. My grandmother in her nightgown had gone to the outhouse right before bedtime. My aunt and uncle and I were in the kitchen. When my grandmother came back in, she had a short branch with a dead snake, at least 6 feet long, draped over it. She had found it in the outhouse and killed it. I remember being frightened of going to the outhouse in the dark for some time after that.

My Aunt Louise was a good cook, too, and I loved to eat at her table almost as much as I enjoyed the chance to play with my girl cousins, especially Mary Frances, who was older than me by about 2 or 3 years, and Ellie, who was a year younger. There were woods across the road from their house, and to the side was a patch of brush where wild huckleberry bushes grew. We'd pick and eat huckleberries until our hands and faces were purple-blue with juice. The price for the huckleberries, however, was getting chiggers. That meant a bath in hot water laced with vinegar when we got back home.

There was a stream in the woods across the road, and cattails grew along the stream. Sometimes, as dusk fell, our parents let us dip the cattails in kerosene and run around the yard pretending we held medieval torches. On languid summer evenings we'd catch fireflies and stash them in Mason jars with holes punched in the lids. We'd also catch June bugs in the heat of midday in the summer. We'd tie a 6-foot length of cotton thread to a June bug leg and hold the other end of the string as the June bug flew around us in circles.

My Uncle Frank used to hunt, and that reminds me of a story involving my sister Dianne, who was 3-1/2 years younger than me. Once, for Sunday dinner at my aunt and uncle's house, my aunt made what Dianne and I thought was chicken and dumplings. As the family began to eat, Uncle Frank asked how we liked the rabbit. My sister, who had been eating along happily, got the most amazing look on her face. She was horrified. Between sobs, all she could manage to say to my Uncle Frank was, "You killed Thumper!" She left the table, but I kept on eating. As far as I was concerned, Thumper was quite tasty with my aunt's dumplings.