Straight from My Heart

By Edith Fletcher

This old world Is not my home when tears fall like rivers and things go wrong, troubles and fears and things wont work out, and Satan starts raging and tries to cause doubt. If I had wings that I could fly, Id take right off into the sky, find my way to my new home. Then this old world could call me gone!

When people are talking and putting me down and I have not one friend on whom I can count, I lift up my hands and whisper this prayer. If I only had wings, Lord, I soon could be there.

If this Is how you feel, I suggest you read my book. Im a single lady, born In Oneida, Kentucky. I raised three beautiful children. I write my own gospel songs and play the guitar! Ive sung in many churches and nursing homes and have a very tender heart for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449767822

Edith Fletcher

I’ve written many Gospel  songs. I live In Bourbon, and after serious spine surgeries and being  placed on disability, I have never been able to accept the fact that I’m limited, so I just keep trying to improve myself with God’s help! I’m a single Christian lady in need of a better income, praying that becoming a writer could help many areas of my life.

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Copyright © 2012 Edith Fletcher

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-6782-2 (e)

WestBow Press rev. date: 11/05/2012

Straight From My Heart

M y book of trials and Triumphs of Edith Stamper, Fletcher! February 1st 2012. I was born on March 17th 1953 to the late McClellan and Pauline Stamper. My Dad passed away in 1987 and my Mom in 1992. It was a very bad time for me when each of them passed. I had learned a lot from my Mom and Dad. I was born in a small town in Kentucky, called Oneida. At that time I made child number five. One older sister had passed at the age of five years. Her name was Ruthy Mae. She was named after my Grandmother Ruth and my Aunt Mae. From the pictures I saw later in life, she looked like my oldest sister Pearlie and one my younger sisters. Later on I noticed she looked like me and my two brothers who came along later, a set of twins! My Mother ended up having thirteen children, eleven still living. I also lost a brother In December 1972, just before Christmas. Oh my God what a sad time for us! His name was Calvin Clyde Stamper. He was two years older than myself and looked a lot like me and the other dark haired, brown eyed children and also my mother. When my mother had very long hair, which she did most of her life; she looked like an Indian Maiden. Dark and very high cheek bones. My dad was fair skinned, sandy brown hair, and blue eyes. I remember living in Kentucky as a little girl where it was very cold in the winter. We didn’t have a lot of money, clothes, or food, although my Parents tried very hard. We burned coal in a coal and wood stove, and sometimes even ran out of that. And had to try and stay warm by piling on more covers. Frost would be so thick on the inside of our windows; it was a very sad time. Daddy butchered hogs we raised ourselves. Also chickens, we used our cows for milk, and butter. The chickens gave us our eggs, and sometimes Mommy would butcher our hens for chicken and dumplings, and our pullets or younger chickens for fried chicken.

We only got candy those days on Holidays. My first nice dress I remember getting was one our neighbor made. She made one for me and one for my sister. Mine was purple, hers was blue. We looked beautiful and felt beautiful. They just fit us both; I was probably ten or twelve years old. I remember waking up so cold sometimes, because our fire had gone out, our heating stove as we called it. It was always in our living room in hopes that it would keep the rest of our house warm also. But it was always cold in the rest of our house. Oh, how I dreaded doing the dishes in the cold kitchen. We all just wanted to huddle around the heating stove. I wonder how we all made it. I remember my mother carrying our laundry to the creek when I was very small, damning up the sides to make a little pond, where we would wash our clothes by hand using home aide soap called lye soap that my mother had made. In the summer it didn’t seem so bad there in Kentucky. I mean I was little and my brother and my sisters as well as I would play in those creeks to stay cool, and I remember catching tad poles, and little crawfish or crawdads for fun. I can remember one day as I was walking with my brother we came upon a big snake and so my brother quickly grabbed a big rock and threw it on the snake and oh my God! Little babies crawled out of that mama snake! We played outside all the time. But winters were horrible I still hate winter weather! And do not like living in Indiana but don’t want to leave my Grandchildren before that I didn’t want to leave my Brothers and sisters. And even when we moved to Indiana I can still remember all too well how we had an a new ringer washer and did our laundry in that but still had to hang them outside even in cold weather and I can remember going to gather them and many times they were frozen instead of being dry!

Any way in the summer in Kentucky we would grow a garden, and store our sweet and arsh potatoes as the southerners called them in the ground. By digging a big hole and placing hay or something inside the hole to help keep the potatoes and other vegetables warm during winter months, we then would lift the top off in winter and have fresh vegetables. We had a smokehouse for our meat, where we cured it with kosher salt to make it keep. My mom canned and dried our food, she even canned sausage, poke salad, and other greens that grew in the woods. Our garden vegetables and many more things. Still today I love to can and preserve my own foods, jams and so on. I love to cook, in the summer we would help mommy pick berries and can those to. Mommy would make jam and use some blackberries, or raspberries, or rhubarb to make us cobblers. They were so good. She would can apples and make apple butter, she also sulfured apples, these I loved. Every year in the fall I think of those sulfured apples and want to make some myself hasn’t happened so far as since every fall I eventually forget, before the apples get ready I forget. It’s very upsetting, since I love them so. Mommy would fry these or fresh apples to go with our breakfast. Us children loved them. With homemade biscuit, sometimes mommy made hand pies by cooking apples, adding sugar and cinnamon, then placing a couple spoonful’s inside a small amount of dough and frying it, restaurants had nothing on us. In the winter, when it got really cold, some of our canned stuff would freeze and break, or bust as my mom called it. Shat was very sad cause we would lose something we had worked so very hard on to help us through the winter and sometimes it lasted longer! I remember mommy having to go to food banks, yes even back then, only we called it commodities! We got cheese, which was great! Mommy used to make us cornbread and while it was still warm, slice a piece down the middle and place a piece of cheese in the middle. Yum! It was so good! It was American cheese. We would also get canned pork and beef, and powdered milk.

Also in the summers I remember going to the cemetery where my sister Ruthy was laid to rest, and having what our family and church called dinner on the ground .we would set up tables on the big grassy yard there and people would come from miles around, to bring and share chicken and dumplings, fried chicken, potato salad, mashed potatoes, fresh picked and cooked green beans, cornbread, soup beans or as the north calls them pinto beans, and desserts, homemade pies, chocolate cobbler and oh my God Grandmas apple fruit cake which everyone loved! We had church and sang and many brought musical instruments and played such as my dad the banjo, Uncle Joe the guitar, my uncle Zoll the harmonica and Aunt Mable the guitar, it was great! In the summertime we would go down by the river to play! This would be like owning lake rights today! On the banks of the river was this slippery mud, us kids one at a time would take a run and grab on to a low hanging tree branch, swing out and slide down the slippery mud, let go and drop into the river. We did this over and over on hot days, poor mommy with all these children playing in the river, and I couldn’t even swim and guess what I still cannot swim today and I just turned 59.

I was outside playing one day and fell somehow and hurt my left knee. So for a long time it would swell, and I couldn’t walk ‘must have been another heartache for my mom and dad. Then one day not long after that, I remember my Dad taking me to the doctor in a small town across the river. We walked from our home that was still some distance from the river where we had to find the low spot and cross over! I remember my dad rolling up his pant legs and I climbed on his back and with his shoes in hand, me on his back we crossed the river. The when across his shoes go back on and we walked to the small post office which my aunt Mable ran and caught a ride to the nearest town Campton, Kentucky, where I would see doctor Maddox, haha I still remember his name. He told my Dad fluid had leaked from my knee. I don’t remember how we treated it though. After we left the doctor we got a ride back to the post office, crossed the river then home. For many years after that I had trouble with my knee. I could never play sports or run because my knee would shift and down I would go! My knee would swell and stay that way for days before going back to normal. When I got hurt on my job in 2004 I had surgery, then eighteen months later was forced back to my old job which I could not do. When my spine shut down, I had to go home and in the parking lot I fell injuring the same knee! Well guess what, after a simple surgery my knee has never given me trouble. Although that fall shook all the hardware lose from my first 9 1/2 hour surgery on my spine and one month later I was having everything replaced in my spine. Doctor said he literally held my spine in his hands to scrape the glue off from the first surgery oh my God! Did I receive anything from my employer, no!

Anyway going back to my early childhood, when I was small many people in Kentucky didn’t have cars. We were one of them. So Daddy built us a sled and it was pulled by our