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Aug 17 - 1990
I was lying resting and couldn't go to sleep so I though of when sister Emma & Jahue her husband, lived in Westonia, Miss., and I was living with them. I was around nine years of age and I was taking music from a lady that her mother ran a boarding house. The mother Mrs. Whichard, had eleven children, ten girls and one boy and the boy died young. So Mrs. Whichard's husband died when the youngest child was real small so she had to raise these children by herself. She was a good woman. My father used to deliver milk, buttermilk, butter, chickens, eggs, sweet potatoes and such like to her. There was a Norwegian boarding there and he said he had eaten okra until he had almost turned to okra. He called it okey. So he said he thought he'd get rid of the okey, so late one evening he went out into the garden and cut all the tops of the okra out and he said (by gum) in a short time the little branches or limbs begun to spring out and every branch was filled with okra so he said we had okey for breakfast, okey for dinner and okey for supper, so he said that taught him a lesson to always let well enough alone.
Back in 1907 or 1908 some where along there people used to have bed bugs. If you've ever seen an Irish potato bug they are similar to a bed bug. They would get in the corners of the mattress, in the springs and any little crevice, and they'd come out at night and suck the blood out of you and if you mashed one it would leave a bloody streak on the sheet & pillow case and would out stink a polecat. So one morning my nephew Rasmus Koch, was passing by the hotel or boarding house and he was this Norwegian holding onto the gallery post and he went to him and asked him what in the world was he doing holding onto that gallery post and the man told him that the bed bugs had drug him out there and he was holding onto the post to keep them from dragging him into the street. I'm sure this is one of Rasmus' tales. I just thought of another incident when I lived in Westonia as a child. Sister Emma had a neighbor who lived next door to her and this woman would call me every day at 12: o'clock and tell me if I'd come and take her husbands dinner to him at the work shop, just a short distance from the house she'd buy me some pretty ribbon to go in my hair, then the next day she'd say if you'll come carry my husband's dinner, I'll buy you some pretty cloth for a
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