Garrett Family History

And so off I would go to Aunt Erma's house out on the edge of our small town. Ethel used to run away from her house and come to ours, but for opposite reasons. She LIKED being with a family wall to wall with kids.  

At Aunt Erma's, Ethel and I slept together on a straw tick. Sleeping on a straw tick is like being somewhere close to heaven. When the threshing is done in the fall, the old straw is taken out, the tick is washed and new golden yellow sweet scented straw is stuffed in until the tick looks like a mountain. When you lie down on it it crackles and the good outdoorsy smell comes up through the tick and it is summer all winter. Usually, an extra supply of straw is kept so the tick can be filled in the spring, too. A straw tick can get pretty flat after a long winter. The big bed in which we slept was out on the screened porch. Winter and summer we slept there. Just as warm when the snow was two feet deep as when the dandelions were blowing in the breeze and their white parachutes were stuck thick on the outside of the screens. The temperature was often 10 degrees below in the winter, but we were never cold. My Uncle Hugh, the one with the temper, had a big rock which sat on the heater with the Ising Glass windows in the front parlor all day long. The rock was almost perfectly round and about a foot high. It was taken from the bed when we got up in the morning, placed on top of the heater, and put back into the bed at supper time so that the bed would be warm by bedtime. Ah, bliss, to sleep with my feet against the rock, sunk deep into the fragrant straw tick, swathed to the ears in homemade quilts and blankets, safe from snow or rain or sleet. Snug as a bug in a rug, Aunt Erma would say. During the night, Ethel and I, through some secret silent communication we never questioned, always turned in unison, so that we fitted against each other like sardines in our long flannel nightgowns.