My Journey Home

By Patricia Ann Daugherty

As I write this, I am seventy-two years old. Some are good memories, and others are bad. They are my memories and no one elses. As I look back over my journey, it makes one wonder, how did I ever get to this point in life with all the struggles I went through? I have been very blessed by God all through my life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514476901

Patricia Ann Daugherty

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MY JOURNEY HOME

Patricia Ann Daugherty

Copyright

© 2016 by Patricia Ann Daugherty.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016904518

ISBN:       Hardcover           978-1-5144-7692-5

                 Softcover            978-1-5144-7691-8

                  eBook                 978-1-5144-7690-1

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Rev. date: 05/26/16

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As I write this, I am seventy-two years old. Some are good memories, and others are bad; they are my memories, and no one else’s. As I look back over my journey, it makes one wonder, how did I ever get to this point in life with all the struggles I went through? I have been very blessed by God all through my life.

We lived in a two-story white frame house that my dad built. There were seven children, two boys and five girls. The first girl died at birth. The house had four and a half bedrooms, living room, dining room, and kitchen. There was a room added off, the downstairs bedroom, which was built for a bathroom but was never finished. In the winter, we would get to use that room where we kept the slop jar, as it was called back then. We always had a two-seater outhouse. One room at the top of the stairs was the half room. In the kitchen, we had a red pump that sat over the sink with running water in the house. I was once told by a lady that she thought we were a rich family because she sure was fascinated by that pump in the kitchen. My mother removed a wall in the kitchen and made a breakfast nook. That is benches all the way around the wall, table in the middle. They always put me in the back so I could not get out. We had a barn, corn crib, cellar where we kept all the canned goods in the winter, stripping room where we stripped tobacco, chicken house, and a garage. We had an orchard with lots of apple and pear trees and a grape vineyard. We always grew a big garden every summer. We had to keep the weeds out of the garden by chopping them out. Next to the woods were blackberry and huckleberry bushes. We picked them when they became ripe. We had to watch for snakes while picking. We had big copperhead and rattlesnakes. Every once in a while, someone would kill a snake and the neighbors would come to see how big it was. In the summer, we always stayed busy chopping weeds out of the tobacco patch and cornfield after we had set the tobacco and planted the corn. We did not have much playtime, except when we would goof off after Mother and Dad had gone to work. One summer our neighbor had built a big pond. We all wanted to go swimming there, but it was a no-no. We chopped the weeds about halfway up the tobacco patch, thinking our dad would think it looked great. We never realized he would walk the patch to see how it all looked. Needless to say there came the fasted belt in the West. We also received a double whammy for going swimming in the pond. I was next to the youngest child, so by the time he got to me, he was tired because he would start with the eldest child in the lineup.

In the house, we had stairs. We would take the feather bed mattress off the bed and ride it down the stairs. Now that was fun bouncing all the way down. We had very steep knobs—that is what hills were called—that I loved to go sleigh riding on an old piece of tin, going really fast under the corn crib and winding up in the creek. I didn’t mean to go under the corn crib and wind up in the creek because you could not guide a piece of tin to where you wanted it to go. Now that was fun. All neighborhood kids would join us. We would sleigh ride on anything that would glide down that hill. We would put socks on our hands because we didn’t have gloves to wear. We really didn’t realize we were poor because all our neighbors were just as poor as we were.

In the summertime, the best thrill we got was swinging on the big wild grape vine. It grew up in the big tree at the edge of the woods. We cleared a space where we