Pith Helmets and Kitchen Kisses

One of my favorite photos of my daddy is of him in his gardening clothes, in bib overalls with a short sleeved shirt and a french style pith helmet! The photo had to be taken in about 1951, before I was born, but he had my sister who looks about 5 years old in the garden with him and they are together holding a push plow. I wish I had a scanner to give you a peek.

My daddy was happy in the garden. Not that he wasn't happy in our home. He was always kissing my Mama in the kitchen. As a little girl I would wiggle between them because I was sure that the best place to be was in the middle of that kind of love, in the middle of kitchen kisses!

  

Now about that pith helmet: I have no idea where he and my uncle Max got them but we have photos of them gardening together both dressed similarly and in those exotic hats. Daddy's pith helmet was like this photo but a light sage green and made of a rather hard fiberboard like material. When I was quite tiny, a very fun thing to do was to sit in that hat and roll around till the button on top inverted. My little toddler tushy then was small enough to fit and it was a great fun! And I don't remember him ever rebuking me or stopping me. I guess that was just too cute for him to be mad at me but I imagine that pith helmet was usually placed in an out of my reach location. Every spring my uncle Max brought the fine Ford tractor he bought when he returned from WWII and turned the whole garden and then daddy did the laying out of rows with a push plow and he loved nothing better than to garden. Toward the end of his life I think he grew enough to fed 10 families every year and he was always sharing the produce with neighbors and friends.

One of my favorite garden memories was sneaking to the garden and eating Tommy Toes (cherry tomatoes) straight from the vine! I was so thrilled when a few years back tomatoes began to be sold attached to some of the vine because the scent of the vines is such a part of the overall experience to me. When I was older and could sneak a handful of sugar I would go to the rhubarb plants and break one off and it eat it raw, dipping it in sugar. I never liked it cooked rhubarb but I sure loved it that way as a child.

Every little girl's first love is her daddy. He had the sweetest smile and to me he looked like Clark Gable. He was a wonderful, good, and loving man. He was the best man I knew and then I met my husband who is so much like him in many ways!

I have a memory of a summer picnic under a grove of black walnut trees up on the mountain above our house and garden. Just a daddy and his girl picnic. I think I may have been between 7 to 9 years old. I made sandwiches but quartered them so they were small. The reasoning behind that was because our dessert was cakes made in my Easy Bake Oven. We sat on a blanket on the grass and drank sweet tea from a Mason Jar. Well... my precious daddy is in Heaven now, but I know him so well and I just can't help but think that someday he'll plan a picnic for us.