Moccasin was a place of enchantment in my imagination when I was a little girl. I longed to go there, and finally I did, when I was thirteen years old. I traveled there in a wagon and we went past Clay hills and Yellow Jacket. Zidie Esplin, and Thomas Esplin and others were making the trip from Orderville out across the sand in Bishop Esplin's outfit. It was in September 1916 probably. Moccasin meant peaches, watermelons, and Indians, according to reports that came to my young ears. The only Indians I had ever seen were from Moccasin. Two squaws came to our house once, just before Christmas, with flour sacks, saying "Christmas gift." They wanted flour, apples, or other food. I remember seeing Mabel sitting silently for a long time in Aunt Vine's house in Orderville.
Later I heard the story of how a large group formed an assembly line in Aunt Lucy's house when it was time to put ripe peaches into two quart glass bottles for the winter supply for everyone in Moccasin, Alton and other places. Of course this job had been preceded by picking peaches off the trees, peeling them, and also by getting the great number of empty bottles ready, some of which were already clean but still had to be boiled, and other bottles which were sent to them dirty and had to be soaked first. It was said that on one particular day Zidie did nothing all day long but screw lids on the bottles filled with boiling hot peaches and their juice, Zidie's son is still (1976) known to me as "Zidie's William."
And so, I finally spent a week at Moccasin and stayed with my second cousin Amy, the youngest child of Uncle Jonathan and Aunt Lucy and the same age as myself. I was the oldest in our family of five girls. Amy had a lovely and varied collection of dolls and one of them had the incredibly long name of Annie-Maria-Jane-Norene-Esther!
One night we slept in a double bed around in the corner part of the long porch which ran across the east of the house and part way along the north side. After we went to bed Amy discovered that a bat was flying around inside this screened porch, She arose and felt around on the wall and took down from its place on the nail, a man's hat, and put it on her head, Then she managed to find matches and light a coal oil lamp, She put another hat on my head and gave me the lamp to hold, and told me to hold open the screen door when she got the bat over there after chasing it around with a broom.
On another night we undressed and were ready to go to bed in an upstairs room when Amy suggested we do something she had evidently done before. We sneaked out of the house in our long white night gowns and went across the sandy lane to the horse water trough. We took off our gowns and care-fully slid into the cold water which came up to our necks and then some; naked, but of course it was dark.
We went swimming every afternoon, in the reservoir. First getting plenty of exercise in the water and then going to lie on the hot sand in the old dresses we wore, until we were scalded good, then we'd go back to the water to cool off. There was another long narrow pond to the north of the house, but it was in the shade of the trees and the water was almost completely covered with floating leaves. Nearby was the narrow "cool cellar" where there was a long plank to stand on to keep people's feet out of the running water, and there were long shelves on each side which were filled with pans of milk, and cream, as well as churned butter and other perishables. Near this pond was a high rope swing, which I occasionally used.
Some of the other things I remember were: Aunt Lucy had on a kitchen shelf a fruit jar which was filled with white pieces of sterilized cloth for instant readiness in case of cut fingers and other injuries. The long table in the dining room was surrounded by many people when they sat down to eat three times a day. The table was so impressive that I included it in a purely fictional story I wrote in High School, about watermelons, Indian kids, and Aunt Lucy.
The old large barn to the west of the house had a long lean-to, with a gently sloping roof. Amy, Jennie, and I climbed up on this lean-to. I distinctly remember that the boards of the roof were weather beaten and bleached almost white from the many years in the hot sun. Moccasin was a sunny place, and a happy place, to us kids.
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