Sunday afternoons should revolve around family
This past weekend brought a huge gush of fond memories about what Sunday afternoons were meant to be. I won’t keep you guessing. Sunday afternoons should revolve around family.
In my much younger days, Sunday afternoons brought a fairly rare car ride from our house at Sutter Siding, along the Illinois Terminal Railroad Tracks in southern Tazewell County, to nearby Minier.
My Uncle Poddy, my mom’s brother, lived in Minier and would often drive the 10 miles or so to our country home to chauffer us here and there. That was after my dad had died when I was 7 years old. He never drove or owned a car and my mom never owned a car, mainly because she didn’t drive.
I never once thought of us as being stuck in our country home because we lacked a car or driver. It simply was how my siblings and I were brought up. And Uncle Poddy never failed to come to the rescue if we truly needed to go somewhere.
He’d often pick us up on Saturday and Sunday evenings to go to his house to watch television, a gizmo that, just like an automobile, our family had yet to acquire. The weekend evening television lineup was amazing, everything from “Have Gun Will Travel,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Wonderful World of Disney” and “The Ed Sullivan Show” to name a few.
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Aunt Marie made the best bowl of popcorn a kid could ask for. She would drizzle freshly melted butter over the freshly popped kernels and top it off with a few shakes of salt. It was more finger-lickin’ good than the best batch of chicken Colonel Sanders could conjure up. My brother, sister, mother and I would devour several bowls per evening of drowning in TV Land.
The most memorable of those road trips from Sutter Siding to Minier always occurred on Sunday afternoons, when we’d wind up at Granny Gant’s house. Having family gather from all directions just seemed like the thing to do, to the point it became tradition.
We would usually be the first to arrive. My uncle, aunt and mom, all being adults, would pile out of the car first, followed by us three Tackett kids – my brother Mike, sister Alice and yours truly. During cold weather, we would scurry into the kitchen and huddle around the big, wood-fired kitchen range, where not too much in advance of our arrival, Grandma Gant had pulled a couple of freshly baked fruit pies or cobblers.
The baked goods would be out of site, tucked away in the warming oven, which was affixed to the stove pipe. As kids, my cousins and I didn’t like the waiting game the adults played before those pies and cobblers were cut and served. But as I grew older, and especially now when I’m no longer younger, those Sunday afternoon visits contained as much sweetness, if not more, as the baked goods.
In warm-weather months, heat was no solution; it was the problem. Most summer Sundays were simply too hot to hang out in Grandma’s non-air-conditioned house, especially if she’d built a fire in the range to bake something. In anticipation of our afternoon visit, my bachelor-Uncle Peck, who lived with Grandma, would have taken the kitchen chairs and placed them in a big circle in the shaded backyard.
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Those chairs were off-limits to us kids. They were reserved for the adults, including several aunts and uncles who had also made Sunday afternoon visits a tradition. They also brought a boatload of kids, all my cousins. We would be relegated to sitting on the lawn.
During the season’s dog days, when the heat was too intense for Grandma to fire up her oven, Uncle Poddy and Aunt Marie would bring ice-cold watermelon for our snacks in late afternoon or early evening.
All those memories came pouring back this past Sunday afternoon and evening as our house and patio deck began filling with friends and family members. That’s a very rare occasion these days since most of our children and grandchildren live hundreds of miles from Lincoln.
The catalyst for this gathering was my son’s positive reply to my request for him to come home from his Tennessee farmstead to help me do some carpenter work that my aching back, legs and right shoulder simply wouldn’t complete. He arrived Friday evening with a truck full of tools and a cab laden with his three kids and his first grandson, Hudson, our first great grandchild.
More than a year had passed since we’ve seen Travis’s family. They’ve all grown and matured. Ava is the mother of our great grandson. She’s showing signs that motherhood truly does require a strong maturity. Eli has grown like the proverbial garden weed in the year since I’ve seen him. A year ago, I thought he was shorter than he should be. I had doubts if he could help his dad with overhead chores that my carpenter project required. I couldn’t have been more off base. Eli is now nearly as tall as my son.
Ana is their sister, the granddaughter I’ve always viewed as our family’s sweet, whimsical princess. Although she has entered the realm of young adulthood, thank goodness she hasn’t lost the sweetness or the whimsicality.
On Saturday, with the work project in full swing, the crew – my good wife Suzi, my good son Travis, grandkids Ana and Eli and special friend Lisa Groth, who had gone to high school with my son and has been the dearest of family friends since her childhood. Work-wise, that band of friends and family got two-thirds of the entire project finished.
Sunday’s agenda was fairly light of work but mighty heavy with fellowship. Suzi’s daughter Jennifer and her companion Nathan showed up to visit with Travis and his family. So did my sister Becky with her two daughters. Our kitchen table became packed with some of our visitors spilling outside on the deck.
I had planned on a meal of spaghetti for five or six and ended up with a houseful. Although she never said a word, I knew Suzi was worrying about where all these people would be seated to dine. Probably more importantly, are we going to have enough for them to eat?
Well, yes, everyone found a place to sit down and most of our guests came back for seconds on the spaghetti. And we still had a dab left over.
It was the kind of Sunday afternoon that I had so enjoyed when I was a kid. I feel pretty safe in saying that my grandkids also had a wonderful Sunday at Papa’s and Grandma’s house.
They are due back in August or September for another small work project. I can’t wait for their return.
Dan Tackett is a retired managing editor of The Courier. He can be reached at dtackett@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Lincoln Courier: Family time on Sunday afternoons
