and let your children tell it to their children,
and their children to the next generation. Joel 1:3 (NIV)
As we talked, I was mentally taking notes, trying to ask questions, get a little more detail...but at 94 years of age, when Grandma gets on a roll...she keeps rolling and I just let her go. But here was what I took away from our visit.
As a little background, my grandma was one of five children and she was the only daughter (her poor brothers!) They lived on a farm just north of town. I always knew they had livestock and a farm, but I had never heard Grandma mention milk before. Part of that could be because my grandpa's family had a country grocery store near Allright, Illinois south of Martinsville. So if she's ever told me about milk, I might have thought it was after she married my grandpa and related to his family's store.
Anyway, we were talking about a house that had burnt down in town last fall and she told me about the Hainley family who lived there a long, long time ago. They owned the grocery store in Martinsville on the north side of the downtown on the west end (ha, there she goes with directions again;) near where Sinclair Implement was. She told me that her family provided all the milk to that grocery store for a while.
She described how picky her mother, Jess, was and how she would not let anyone touch those milk bottles because she did not want even a speck of dirt touching them. The boys were not allowed to mess with them. And one time when Jess and Ernie had to go north for three days, grandma and her friend, Jane, were in charge of the milk and getting it to the grocery store. Jess trusted grandma to be very careful and not let any speck of dirt get near those milk bottles.
After the milk was retrieved from their milk cows, it was thoroughly strained. She said they did not have good strainers back then so her mother used very clean cloths or pieces of material or fabric, putting one on top of another, to strain the milk because she did not want anything, not even a speck, to be left in their milk. (I can see where my grandma gets some of her little quirks.)
After their 'contract' ended with the grocery store, they ran a milk route in town. At one point she said they had as many as 50 customers. Grandma described how one of her brothers would drive the car and she or one of the other brothers would hop out and leave the milk. She said that at almost every stop, the milk bottle from the day before was cleaned and on the step or porch waiting to be exchanged. I asked how often they ran the route...every evening. Talk about a commitment! They delivered the milk in quart-sized milk jars similar to the one shown above. And of course, they were to be very careful with the jars so as not to get them dirty.
As we were talking, she stopped and I could tell something had popped into her head. She remembered that around the time of World War II when they were running the milk route, people were putting their Christmas trees outside on their porches and decorating them with lights and everything and it made the route kind of special during that time because they got to see all the different Christmas trees.
So that's the story of my grandma and her family delivering milk. It might be old news to the rest of my family and cousins, but it was interesting to me, and as soon as she started talking, I knew I wanted to write about it.
I love the scripture referenced above, it is one of my favorites...I realize in the context of the text in Joel, they're talking about an invasion of locusts, but I think it can apply to many things. It's good to learn about our ancestors and our history. It's interesting and, you know, it could come in handy one of these days...
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