Читать книгу Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories. Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas онлайн

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Might say I was nearly six years old before I got my first pants—and even then I didn’t wear them regularly. They were knee pants—in style, which style endured for a long time. I knew one young fellow in Wetmore who wore his knee-pants right up to his wedding day. When I first began howling for pants, my mother said I was lucky she hadn ’ t dressed me in a flour sack, with holes cut out for head and arms, like Preacher Wamyer’s kids had been clothed, in our neighborhood. But the joke was, she did not happen to have a flour sack, and she said that in this God-for-saken country she was not likely to have one for ages. My mother made me shirts with long tails — and when around home out there in the sticks, in hot weather, I would not bother with the britches. I recall the time mother took me with her to a quilting at the home of one of the Porter women—it might have been at the home of Kate Evans, wife of Bill Evans, the famous old stage-driver; but more likely it was the home of Amanda Ann Watson, widow, who later married Brown Ellet. Johnny Bill Watson, a red headed, freckled face boy about my age, played rough, making it plenty hot for me. I pulled off my pants, went into the house, and threw my britches onto the quilting frame—greatly humiliating my mother, and creating uproarous laughter from the women.