If there was one thing Ashdown, Arkansas had when I was growing up, it was plenty for kids to do.

During the summer months, activities included baseball, day trips to swim at the lake, visiting kinfolk, and spending the night at a friend’s house. And of course, lawn work.

Fall meant more lawn work, including raking (pine needles are not your friend), football, splitting wood for the fireplace for next year, and Halloween.

Winter brought the holidays and a break from lawn care. ...

kitch [ kich ] noun

Art, decorative objects and other forms of representation of questionable artistic or aesthetic value; a representation that is excessively sentimental, overdone, or vulgar. ~ Dictionary.com

Whenever I see canister sets, cookie jars, clocks and Formica dinette sets from the 50s and 60s, I feel as if I’ve gone home. These items adorned my youth, but as often happens, new things come and old things go.

As the 70s made way for harvest gold, avocado green, and shag carpet ...

I’m not sure how a tomato became the symbol of sewing in the South, but it did. My mom, and every other mom I knew in Ashdown, Arkansas, had a pincushion in the shape of a tomato.

Many of those pincushions are still around.

Judging from the workload that women endured at the time, it seems that each lady would have been well within their right to use a voodoo doll instead, but no, it was a tomato.

When I was very young, ...

I saw a T-shirt that said, “I like a couple of my buddies, my dog, and that’s about it.”

It substantiated what I had long felt, seldom said, and had heard from others. Many of us like our dogs better than most people. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

Every time we lose a dog, I always say I’ll never get another one. It just hurts too much. And if I’m honest, which I am, the hurt often exceeds ...

My uncle’s mother, Mrs. Ward, had a storm shelter. And I snuck into it every chance I got. Few others had one, so a storm shelter was absolutely fascinating to me.

At least, a storm shelter is what they told all of the kids it was. It doubled as a storm shelter, but it was actually a bomb shelter.

In mid-20th Century America, most kids were kept in the dark about a lot of things, including potential thermonuclear war.

When I was growing ...

When Eisenhower, JFK, and LBJ were in office, rarely would you find a kitchen that didn’t have an electric skillet.

Waking up each morning to the smell of bacon, sausage, and fried potatoes was just how the world turned in 1960s Ashdown, Arkansas.

And an electric skillet was part of what made that possible.

Moms across the South used cast iron to fry up meals, but there were only so many skillets and spaces on the stovetop. That’s where the electric skillet came ...

It takes a lot of trust to let someone shave your face with a straight razor. But from what the old timers used to say, there’s no better or closer shave.

My great grandfather shaved with a mug, brush, and straight razor. So did other men in my family.

As a child growing up in Ashdown, Arkansas, I would watch them lather up the soap with their brush. The ads on TV showed convenient cans of all kinds of shaving cream, but ...

Kids today have no idea what real phones were like. I do. And I miss them.

I still have a hard time comprehending how I can talk to someone on a phone that isn’t attached to the kitchen wall. On a phone that was harvest gold, avocado green, or in my family’s case, lemon yellow.

And phones used to have weight to them. Especially the ones at our older relatives homes. The handsets could have been used to prop up a Buick ...

If you see a church cookbook, buy it. When women in a church are asked to submit their best recipes for a fundraiser, they bring their A game.

They do not want to be outdone. You will not find better recipes anywhere else.

I’ve admitted this before. I’m a cookbook addict. When my wife sees me coming through the door with an armload of books, she knows I’ve found an estate or garage sale and bought every cookbook they had.

And there’s no ...

When I was growing up in Ashdown, Arkansas, I thought every adult was old. I really couldn’t tell how old someone was, I just knew that they looked old to me, so they were.

Maybe that’s why the young man gave me the discount.

About a dozen years ago, I went in early one morning to a restaurant that served breakfast. It’s gone now, but when it was around it was one of the few places where you could get real homemade ...