Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

the neighboring farm had taken no longer than fifteen minutes.
    Standing at the new six-eye, coal-burning stove Ben Roy had just bought for his Fedora, Eula alternated sampling from the five big iron kettles, all in various stages of cooking. She delighted in the routine of sameness, and through the years of this mass production had developed an efficient process to get the job done on the allotted day. Now, with six burners, she could keep five pots simmering, instead of three, with the sixth eye available for the cooling. That would cut off about three hours of sweat-pouring work. In the years since she took over the job as main canning-day cook from her dead mother, Eula had learned to block out the Thornton women’s chatter and lose herself in her own memories of girlhood.
    Although there were four Thornton sons, Eula and Bessie had been the only girls. She and her sister could not have been more dissimilar. Bessie, five years younger and half a head shorter, had taken more after their curvaceous mother in height and build, but she was her father’s spitting image in coloring. Bessie’s hair had definite yellows and light browns to it, while Alexander had once described Eula’s hair color as “neither this nor that…more like the color of house dust…” Eula knew in her heart that he hadn’t meant to hurt, so she never held the remark against him. But Old Ben had clearly favored his younger daughter with her creamy complexion, pinched-in waist, high bosom, and light brown eyes. Old Ben had said Eula’s eyes reminded him of the burned underside of a cook pot. Her father had meant to hurt, and Eula did hold it against him.
    Her father had just about cried when that Kentucky man came down and asked for Bessie’s hand though she was only sixteen. It had taken Momma Thornton a lot of breath to convince her husband that the marriage would be a very profitable one for Bessie. But the old man had still been reluctant to bestow his blessings on the union until Momma reminded him that Eula would never make such a good marriage. In fact, their oldest daughter stood an excellent chance of being an old maid. In that case, it would be up to Bessie to take in her sister. Unable to deny the wisdom of his wife’s reasoning, Old Ben bid a sorrowful good-bye to his favorite daughter.
    “Eula Mae, are those peaches ’bout ready?” Cora Lee, one of the Thornton cousins, jarred Eula out of her musings as she stuffed a tea towel into a Mason jar to complete its drying.
    Ignoring the annoying Cora Lee, Eula bent over a pot of dark cherries just coming to a boil. She lowered her long-handled wooden spoon into a second kettle on a back burner. Filling it only a quarter full and raising it to her lips, she blew on the hot peaches to cool them before she stuck out a tongue to sample.
    “I declare, Aunt Eula, I don’t know how you can stand there over all those cooking pots in this heat.” Tillie, Ben Roy and Fedora’s just-married twenty-one-year-old daughter, patted the kitchen table, which was nearly covered with bowls of cherries, pits, peaches, cored apples, plums, sugar, flour, glass jars, lids, and sealing wax. Tillie’s hand came to rest on her aunt’s account journal. Flipping to the back cover, the newlywed began to tear at the last page.
    Without thinking, Eula tapped the wooden spoon on the edge of the iron pot holding the cherries.
    “Tillie, your momma’s got a fan in the kitchen safe. Use it, not one of my journal pages.” Eula gave her niece an apologetic smile.
    “Eula Mae, you still writin’ down everything in that journal of yours? How many jars of this and how many cans of that? I declare, all that figurin’ would drive me crazy.” Fedora waved the paring knife in the air while she held a half-cored apple in the other hand. “I can’t be bothered. I just use stuff ’til I run out. If I need more, Ben Roy will buy it off ’n somebody.” Finished with the cored apple, Fedora handed it over to Cora Lee.
    With a few quick strokes of her butcher knife, Cora cubed the apple into six parts.
    “I just like to know how much I have so I can pace myself.” Eula really wanted to tell Fedora that her Thornton mother-in-law had insisted that the mark of a good homemaker was how well she kept her farm books.
    Mother Thornton had been a master at managing the household accounts on the large farm, and while Bessie was the prime target of her instruction, Eula had been a keen observer.
    Right after her