Memories by Daniel Suits

When we moved to the house on Harrison Avenue, she took advantage of our large back yard and of the vacant lot on the south side of the house to cultivate an extensive vegetable garden that supplied us with fresh vegetables all summer long.  Her corn was exceptional.  By planting "Country Gentleman," a large-eared, fine grained white corn, in alternate rows with "Golden Bantam," a small, yellow, large grain, very sweet variety, she produced her on hybrid, a lage yellow very sweet ear.

Some of us were reluctantly drafted to help with her farming from time to time.  The most unpleasant chore was to distribute fertilizer to the growing plants.  Consistent with her use of natural dyes for her braided rugs, Mommom was a born organic gardener.  It would never have occurred to her to put artificial chemicals on anything we were going to eat.  Instead, her fertilizer of choice was a tub of very mature "tea," concocted from a rich mixture of sheep manure and water.  When, after a couple of weeks of aging, it reached the desired odor and consistency, we had to dip it with an old tin can and carefully administer it to the plants to be nourished. 

     To occupy the winter hours, she took up quilting.  In our attic, she arranged a square quilting frame of wood slats held together at the corners by C-clamps and supported by wooden horses.  She quilted alone and by hand, sewing tiny stitches, working her way across the material.  When she had quilted far as she could comfortably reach, she unscrewed the C-clamps and rolled the up the finished portion of the quilt on the wood slat, bringing a new section within reach.   True to her interest in natural materials, she stuffed the quilts with raw cotton, sent by her sister Minnie from her cotton plantation in Louisiana.  She removed the cotton seeds and carded the fiber by hand with the aid of a pair of heavy wire brushes.

She sewed the patchwork by hand into patterns, some of which were traditional, and some of her own devising.  When Adelaide and Dan were married, she made two quilts as presents for the bride.  One was a traditional "wedding-ring" design, the other one of her own patterns.  When she had nothing else to occupy her time, she sewed shirts.  She made wonderful shirts, but Mommom was dissatisfied.  She complained that she couldn’t find the kind of broadcloth she wanted, because the big shirt manufacturers monopolized the best prints.

     Having lied about her age when she was hired, Mommom was seventy five before she finally retired from Paul Brown and Company.  With retirement came a new hobby: the cultivation of iris.  She entered into iris growing with the same energy and enthusiasm she had brought to bear on her other hobbies, and it wasn’t long before our yard was dotted with beds of iris in all colors. 

She became an active member of the St. Louis chapter of the American Iris Society, and began to experiment with hybridization.  When the national Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis, Mommom’s garden was one of the sites on the tour of local growers.