My mom baked bread almost always on Saturday mornings, in order for it be fresh when Dad got home. The day was spent with all of us anticipating his arrival Saturday evening (those were the days of a six-day work week). He’d leave again, either late Sunday evening or before dawn on Monday — the weekends went fast. We kids hoped we’d have a car ride (Mom didn’t drive), even though that was possibly the last thing he wanted to do. If it were summertime, he’d take us to Pearson’s Lake for a dip. But the first chore on Saturday morning was for us kids to go to Art Larson’s General Merchandise store for groceries.
Mom would give us the list and almost always two of us would walk the three blocks down the hill to the store — summer and winter, rain or snow. Seemed everyone came to town to shop Saturday mornings. In the forties there were no shopping carts — one waited until either Art or Mr. Nelson (our elementary teacher who moonlighted Saturdays for Art) would ask us for Mom’s grocery list.
We didn’t get waited upon in the order of our arrival, but rather in order of seniority We were kids, and we waited, and waited until the grownups were taken care of. Often, we stood in the aisle over an hour, ignored, while others were served ahead of us.
A most awful memory happened one very cold winter morning at the store. I can’t say if my brother John dared me, or if I just did it, but I put my tongue on the store’s front door steel bar. I suppose I jerked backward, and oh, did that hurt. Needless to say, I never did it again.
Often today when I remove eggs from a carton I think back to the forties when eggs were simply stacked into a brown paper sack, the size of a lunch bag. We knew when we got home with the groceries Mom would immediately check the eggs to see whether or not we’d been careful. She’d also wonder why we had been gone so long. She didn’t ever seem to empathize with our frustrations, because Art Larson was an important man in town and in the church. (And brother Arthur carried his name!)
I’ve drifted… I started writing about my mom baking bread on Saturday morning — oopsie!
