Hens, Humming, and Having Enough

This  old, well-worn photograph of Great-grandma Rosa Jarrell Rainey brings to mind several attributes that this hearty woman possessed and exhibited in her daily life. I never knew her, but my mother, Bernyce Smith Gates, who spent much time with her as a child has shared her memories.

Raising chickens was a means of support, not a hobby. She raised her chickens in order to sell their eggs to local grocery stores primarily in Fairfax. Her egg money bought groceries as well as the mash she bought for the chicken feed.

She might butcher an old rooster for chicken and dumplings but tried never to use one of her good laying hens for this main dish on their dinner table. She had a fenced chicken yard to protect her flock from losing even one to a opossum, skunk, or stray dog. One of her last outdoor chores of each evening was making sure her chickens were safely secure in the hen house.

Mother recalls her grandmother doing the chicken house repairs herself, humming as she worked. I frequently hum as I do tasks and have been told the tougher the task becomes the more consistently I hum! She seemingly never complained or asked others to help her but just hummed as she did it herself. What a stellar example to emulate!

Her son-in-law and my maternal grandfather was Calvin Callcayah Smith who just happened to be half-Cherokee. I understand there was a stigma attached to interracial marriage in the 1920s when my grandmother, Gladys Vivian Rainey married my grandpa in spite of her parents' reservations. However, my grandpa by his humor and helpfulness endeared himself to the woman he referred to as “Granny.” He and his mother-in-law would load around four cases of eggs in the back of her Model A two-seater Ford that had belonged to her deceased husband. According to my mother, her grandmother never learned to drive but thoroughly enjoyed going to town, usually on Saturday, as my grandfather drove her car with her riding in the front seat with him and the back seat filled with their eggs to sell. The two of them would chuckle about filling the back of the little car with as many cases of eggs as possible! Incidentally, one case held 30 dozen or 360 eggs so they were transporting 1,440 eggs each week! Grandpa was known for his fast driving. Coupled with the roads from the Big Bend to Fairfax, one wonders how he held the speed down to keep from having scrambled eggs!

It is important to know Great-grandma Rainey never received one Social Security Check. She became a widow at the age of 65. Grandpa Rainey left her with no life insurance policy. No annuity payments, no retirement checks, or any other source of income came her way. In fact, she did have a small savings that was lost when the bank in Ralston where she had invested it, folded as a result of the Crash of 1929 precipitating the Great Depression.

As a widow, she lived for another 20 years before her own death. Her youngest daughter Emma Maryann Rainey Buckley purchased the home and land where they lived from Catherine Mosier but never charged her mother to live there. Her younger son Eugene R. Rainey farmed the tillable ground, and she received a modest portion of the money earned from the sale of the crop harvested. As a result, her lifestyle of frugalness must have served her well in her later years ensuring that she "stayed out of the poorhouse," which was her way of saying she wanted to never be in financial distress. And fortunately, she never was--thanks to her hens, humming, and having just enough.