Making Do and Hanging On

      My dad loved popcorn.  He especially loved a big bowl of buttered, salted popcorn with a couple of Staymen-Winesap apples while listening in the evenings to “Amos n’ Andy” and “Lum n’ Abner” on our old Grebe radio.

      Usually, someone in the family grew enough popcorn to supply us through the winter.  The winter when I was six, however, we ran out of popcorn during a long, snowy spell.

      With outdoor work stifled by the heavy snow, Daddy had nothing to do but fret about his inactivity and the lack of popcorn. And when we gathered in the evening to hear those magical voices from the radio, it was not the same, as Daddy said, without the popcorn.

      Cooper’s Store, about a mile up the graveled valley road, carried popcorn, so I guess some families could afford to buy it. But we weren’t among those lucky few. We, like many of our neighbors during the Great Depression, were living on home-canned food, apples and potatoes from the cellar, and venison, looking forward to next year’s garden produce. Cash was almost nonexistent; most local commerce was by barter or credit until the next sale of apples—provided there was an apple crop and buyers for the fruit.

      So there was poor Daddy, stuck in the little house with Mamma and me, dead broke and staring at the piling-up snow, wrinkling his brow and muttering in the throes of popcorn withdrawal.