When you get in your sixth decade of life, sometimes you take a moment to reminisce about the “good ol’ days.”
So it is with Ted and Debbie Wade. The latter just retired as the front office clerk at Ware County High School, a position she held for many years.
With time on her hands, she collaborated with her husband, Ted, on a book that brings back memories of long ago growing up in a big family on the farm in south Georgia.
Ted’s parents were Edward Carl Wade and Beulah Lee Peacock Wade. They both came from large families.
His father’s family had one child and his mother’s had 20. The Peacock household’s 20 consisted of three sets of twins.
The farm was in Bacon County where the main cash crop was tobacco. All the kids had to work the tobacco fields, and there are numerous stories of summer days in the field and barns farming tobacco and playing with tobacco hornworms.
“Teddy” was the youngest of 10 children, and as the youngest he was put through many trials and tribulations, some humorous, some tragic, but most about the way it was growing up on a sharecropping farm.
His sisters named him “Teddy” after the teddy bear you could order in the Sears and Roebuck catalog.
Teddy’s siblings were generally two years apart, starting with Betty, then Chester, who passed away from fever at 11 years old. They were followed by Ruth, Bo, Eula, Bobby, Barbara, twins Larry and Linda, who also passed at a very young age, and finally Teddy, who was born in 1949.
Teddy loved animals, and there are quite a few stories that I could relate to. My mother grew up in Trenton, Fla., and she, too, worked in tobacco fields as the youngest of 14 children. Her family lived in a “cracker” house, just as Ted’s family did.
Cracker houses are characterized by raised floors, a straight central hallway from the front to the back of the home and a detached kitchen. The detached kitchen was for safety purposes since most cook stoves were fueled with wood and the chances of a fire starting in the homes were high.
The homes were typically built with wide porches, or verandas wrapping around the entire home, to provide shade as well as additional living space.
Ted tells the story of his brother, Bo, being left at church where he had fallen asleep on the back pew. (What big family hasn’t had this happen at one time or another?)
Learning to ride a bicycle and driving a car, rituals every kid looks forward to, also are in the book. Who didn’t build a treehouse or use the barn as a fort?
Oh, the memories.
Family reunions with large families and a zillion cousins were the best. Meals were big deals with everyone around a table, sometimes outside where you could cool off a little.
Cutting your own peach tree switch when it was time for punishment, and there were plenty of those times for many of us!
Oh the memories of corncob wars (ours were with tomatoes which ended at the peach tree cutting a switch), playing games with your parents, everyone working together with one goal in mind, picking on siblings, fighting with siblings, yet no one else dared mess with them.
Of course, there are tragedies in every life, and the book offers those from the family.
Life is a continuous journey, like a canoe ride on the river of life. Occasionally, that canoe is going to turn over. What you do when it does determines your mettle.
The world has changed tremendously in 60 short years, and it will never be the same. Ted finishes the book with a testimony of his relationship with God andHis Son.
That may take you back to your conversion, and if it doesn’t, maybe it will prompt you to examine your life and where you’re heading.
You’re in that canoe whether you want to be or not, and there’s a destination up ahead drawing ever closer.
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