3. More About Papa

“Brother Adams,” continued Mr. Strickland, “the preacher who made the maple sirup was a one for old-fashioned buckwheat cakes, the kind that are made with yeast. In winter there was a crock of yeast sitting inside the edge of the big fireplace where it was always warm.”

Papa smiled understandingly. The picture of this carefree home in Kentucky stirred nostalgic memories of his boyhood on the farm… That afternoon he talked it over with Mama. She was ecstatic!

They could hardly wait for the good old Kentuckian to return home and call the brethren together for conference. Mama was so confident of the outcome that she began to pack up the few things they had acquired during her own tenure. I don’t know what might have happened to her if this “call” had failed to come off: surely it would have been a hard blow. Papa haunted the post office and sent to the D. H. Ferry Company of Detroit for a seed catalogue. (If some snoopy, otherwise unemployed sleuth among you should discover that the Ferry Seed Company was not in business at that date, don’t come running to me with your troubles. I’m doing the best I can to inform you that Papa was now ablaze with desire to return to the open spaces.)

I have no clear recollection of the excitement which prevailed in our home when the good news came. A lot of people were surprised; no doubt about that. All I remember of the long, hot day-coach journey to Cincinnati was my own shameful behavior while we waited, at the station in Lima, late in the night, for our southbound train. Some friendly old lady, noticing the nice little boy’s weariness, presented him with a large, beautiful lemon, which he spurned scornfully.

“That sour thing!” he muttered, to the great embarrassment of his mama and his sister Lou; for little Lou, then ten, was coming along with us. I couldn’t have borne it if, for any reason, my sweet sister had been left behind. I loved her dearly.

I recall nothing about our arrival in Cincinnati, except the pungent stink of the tanneries near the big river and the clatter of roughshod hoofs and iron wheels on the cobblestones that paved the slope to the wharves. And, blended with the fumes of the tanneries was the aroma of roasting coffee. (When I told Mama, many years afterward, about my remembrance of these smells, she said, “You might have smelled the tanneries on that trip when you were four, but not the coffee. We didn’t go that far into the city. You must have smelled the coffee on one of our later journeys to Cincinnati.” And perhaps she was right.)

I have no remembrance of our being met by our new friends from Kentucky, or of our necessary trip across to Covington on a ferry, or our arrival at the enchanted old parsonage in the country. I must have been a very sleepy little boy that day.