Rilda Laree Ennis. my mom’s maiden name. She was the youngest of four so she grew up with three older brothers that may provide the context for pieces and parts of what I’m about to tell you about my mom. She was a tough cookie!
Growing up as a little girl she was known for being fast a foot! She would run to school which was about 2 miles away and they said her little legs were like a blur as she ran and she ran hard and fast.
My mom’s dad George Ennis just had a few relatives in Oklahoma and Okemah but her mother Delia was from a huge family, the Guin.
Honestly I found the words to describe my dad no problem but with my mom I’m not sure words do her justice
She was the most unusual person man or woman that I’ve ever known and that says a lot because I knew her better than anyone else in my family including better than my dad. We did everything together
We dance together we didn’t sing much together cause neither one of us had a gift for that but for dancing we danced a lot
We walked together and I mean walked a lot. we walked fence lines we walked the countryside when one of our cows got out of a fence and we had pastures for cows that were two or 3 miles away and difficult to get to at best one of our bigger pasture didn’t even have a road to it but I never heard her complain. We had to take care of the cat we had to take care of the fences we had to take care of the animals around the farmhouse and always felt we had to take care of each other.
I can remember her complaining about other people and how they acted stupid at times but I never heard her complain about taking care of the farm the house the kids my dad defenses no matter how difficult it was to do or in this case how much walking it took to do.
She never complained not about her lot in life but others whose lives got in her mind a lot all pun intended.
She had a memory of what others had done or said to her or dad or us but she also had an unbelievable memory of everyone in the family, how old they was, their birthdays, where they grew up, how they grew up and could remember details no one else could not even members of their immediate family.
and when she told stories about them she loved to exaggerate not just the bad but the good to. When she liked somebody the details of the story was quite different than when she didn’t!
She could drive a tractor as good as my dad and probably spent more time in the tractor seat than he did for sure after my dad went to work as a plumber Okemah she spent more time holding the fields, picking cotton, raising corn, sowing alfalfa and Lespedeza fields for cattle feed and for bailing hay.
We had an old hand crank sprayer (called it a broadcast seeder) that we would walk the entire length of the field turning a crank which turned sprayed seed 10 to 20 feet each side of us then we would walk over 20 to 40 feet and walk back down the pasture spring more seed until the job was done. Some of these fields were just an acre or two but some of them was 30 or 40 acres. That is a lot of walking
Alfalfa was good for cattle that were milk producers and lespedesa for the beef cattle! So we had to dow seeds in a leas two different fields for two different types of cows.
My mom was a fiery redhead and she had it out once with my grandpa over the way he was treating my dad! She felt he was abusing my dad’s time and resources and generosity and let him know it in no uncertain terms! She told him to leave my dad alone, stop abusing him, and that even though he was mean spirited towards all his kids he especially took a lot out on my dad and my dad never said a word but that was not my mom’s personality she had a lot to say and she did and she wasn’t afraid to and I think my grandpa and for sure my dad respected her for that.
She let him know that he treated his dogs better than his kids and that he treated his oldest son like a slave! She got her point across! A stubbornness my grandpa was he actually lit up a little the way he treated he is now grown kids.
As context my Aunt Bonnie was just a teenager or even in her preteens when my dad and her got married.
I don’t think my mom ever forgave my grandpa scripture for the way he treated his kids he was easiest on Bonnie because she was the youngest and he was the hardest on my dad because he was the oldest. And as I said before he treated his prized wolf dogs better than his kids and better than his wife!
One occasion that embodied a lot of walking and then an unbelievable experience that my mom and I overcame would just share determination and tenacity.
One of our cows had got out and she was in a pasture over a mile and a half away upper hill with no roads! She just had her calf and was very protective of her little baby so when mom and I approached she became very aggressive toward us let us know she didn’t trust us and wanted us to stay away from her baby.
My mom picked up a stick and a couple of times the old cow got so close that mom was able to hit her on the nose with that stick but one time the new mother cow from a distance decided to run pretty much full speed at my mom and it kind of surprise my mom so she threw a stick to shoot it away the stick tumbled off the back of the mother and stuck the calf right in the eye. Put the calf eye out.
Scared us all! My mom had a sweater to protector from the wind and the sun so she took it off and used it to clean as best she could the little calf bleeding eye. At first we wrapped it around the calf’s head to slow down the bleeding as best we could but now the problem was as a calf couldn’t see who to follow and we couldn’t carry it so we took it off and with a lot of patience and she determination we got the mom in her calf back to the barn safely and with only a few incidents. Once we got on the graded road it was easy to guide mom in the calf down the road to the house. Mom doctored the calfs eye and that calf became our pet for the rest of its life. The calf always walked with a good eye pointing forward in other words she had slightly turn her head to see where she was going. Memories like that stick with you
By the way we, for a while anyway, and even though it was an accident as we heard them home we both felt really scared and for putting out the little calf eye.
As far back as I could remember we always had a large garden. The garden fence wrapped around the north and west side of the graveyard. So the garden was kinda like a reversed L shape _| saving a lot of time effort and money to fence the garden which was absolutely necessary to keep the environment and the animals out of our garden.
Yes dad would help at times with the garden but most of the planning were done by Mom and I Sherry would help some.
We would plant 2 or 3 50’ rows. each row was about three or 4 foot apart and each tomato plant was about of 2 or 3 ft from each other. using a spade to dig each hole, add a handful of fertilizer in each hole, plant the small tomato plant and I would follow Mom and my sis doing that with a bucket of water and add water to every tomato plant. It was a family affair! We would water each tomato plant about three days later and we always had tons of tomatoes!
We would also help my grandma and grandpa plant their garden and her brother Lee and her sister-in-law Bessie plant their garden.
We shared the produce of those gardens plus we shared the fruit from the fruit trees in my grandpa’s Orchard. My grandpa and it really had a fantastic orchard with really juicy peaches and plums. crisp apples and pears! Deeeelicious
We lived about 2 miles from grandma and grandpa Ennis, about the same distance from grandma and grandpa Scrimshire. and Lee and Bessie lived about a half a mile from grandma and grandpa Ennis!
She did like to visit her mom and dad and her brothers Leonard Orville. Vernon moved to California after he got married to Edith way before I got to know him very well. Vernon would visit at times with his wife and daughter, but not often we all enjoyed it when he did and we even went out to see him once I even went out there to see him on my way to Vietnam. He could hardly believe his eyes when I showed up.
Most of the time when we visited we visited by tractor and trailer, sometimes grandpa Innis would come and get us and his wagon and horse team and at times we would drive our old work truck from garden to garden harvesting what we could eating what we could and canning what we couldn’t eat.
Just a few things about what my mom did as a young wife and mother.
- My mom done most of the canning for everyone and cooked every meal for the family.
- She had to draw water to wash clothes and she wash clothes by hand then she got a hand crank washing machine and she loved it
- She hung the wash out to dry on a double clothes line at the back of the house. When dry she sometimes hung them in our closets.
- She had a big pressure cooker for canning.
- During the spring and summer of the harvest season she would cook for the farm hands planting and hoeing the crops.
- Of course, she was planting and hoeing herself until it was time to lay the hoe down or take the cotton sack off her shoulder and go cook for the crew!
- She planted and harvested most of the produce in our hugh garden year after year my mine & Sherrie’s help.
- Every day she kept a wash basin full and clean in the kitchen for washing dishes and our hands and faced.
Some of our cousins who helped us on the farm did help Mom out on occasions. Actually once Mom trained them to do some of what she needed help with they would often would do that chord for that season, giving her a little bit of a break so she didn’t have to do it all…
If on one season one of them got lazy on her my dad would have hell to pay if he invited him to come back to help again… she would not tolerate laziness… and was not afraid to say so!
My dad’s sisterd Zelda, Zora and Bonnie liked my mom more than some of her own relatives (the Guinn’s) did!
They knew how hard she worked because Zelda and Zora had worked that hard too not so much money but because she was the youngest she didn’t have have to slave side-by-side with my dad on my grandpa’s farm.
There were a few chores my mom seldom done unless my dad was gone or sick and that was feeding the animals like the cows, chickens & pigs or milk in the cows but believe me if need be she could do it and often did.
I said a lot about how hard a worker my dad was but honestly mom could hold her own too and at times often had to & did.
Mom and dad spent a lot of time teaching us by example but very little time teaching like a teacher would from books. when you had to read and write by kerosene lamp you were limited in what you could teach your children or even yourself so most of what they learned they taught us by example…
One thing I always most appreciated about my mom was her heating us water to take a bath in once a week and for four people that was no small task but she did it and she heated enough to have a small tub for each of us to wash in… she’ll always help give us a bath, but I never seen her or dad taking a bath, but they were noted as clean and neat people…
I never saw her ride a horse. I never saw her go swimming in a pond or lake or river! Never saw our climate tree, but I saw her use a ladder and a pole to get the fruit from fruit trees then as she knocked him off the tree, Sherri and I would pick them up and after she cleaned the fruit off the branches of the tree as well as she could, she would help us pick them up and put them in a basket.
I know she liked pets, but I never saw her pet a pet or have a personal pet. It was always one of the kids or Dads pets. She also didn’t feed the pets. That was our job. They were our pets. We never had a cat. We did have a baby raccoon that became our resident raccoon until we had to get rid of it for tearing a hole in the roof, that raccoon had overstayed It’s welcome. What few pets we had, a dog or two she loved the boss around, but they served a purpose. Our pets worked like we worked. Her favorite pet was tippy cow dog, and she could direct that cow dog better than any of us could and often without tippy’s help we would’ve been out of Loss to hurt a large group of cows into the barn or into another field, she did appreciate tippy.
When I wanted to stay overnight somewhere, I had to get my dad or Sherry to fill in for me I knew better than to ask my mom. Plus, I would feel guilty if I did. If she needed to get a bail of hay to feed one of the animals she could, but if she could get one of us to do it, she did.
Even though she kinda resented my grandpa for having Bonnie as his favorite – Everyone including Sherri thought I was Mom‘s favorite and everyone including me thought Sherri was my dad‘s favorite but being a favorite doesn’t mean being a lesser one in the family. We all have people we warm up to even our kids, our brothers and sisters and our parents and grandparents so did she and so did dad and it didn’t mean anything to any of us we understood why…
Even though it meant more work for her, she loved to have a dance on the weekend. She would clean that middle room, which was actually her and dad‘s bedroom, clean it out move the bed and that would be the room that we would dance in wood floors and all.
And man could she dance and she loved to. She had a lot of favorite music, but if it didn’t move you to dance, she didn’t care much for it. Sad songs was OK with her, but songs you could dance to was her favorite.
She would sit out a lot of chairs up against the walls, and if there was a fiddle or guitar player, he would stand in front of the fireplace to play, and we had the whole room to dance in. Almost everyone danced even the bashful teenagers. We have anywhere from a half a dozen to two dozen people at some of our square dances we called him, but we did more than just square dancing. if she saw someone else do a dance, she could repeat it fairly quickly. That was her gift and everybody loved to watch her dance, especially the jig…
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