I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: first saturdays in montgomery

  • The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 2 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 2 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    My cousin James Paul texted me the ingredients we needed for our Sunday afternoon plum jelly project, and I was not surprised to discover the only item for the jelly I had in our Worsham Street kitchen was the plums piled high on the counters which meant the Saturday night before we planned to make the plum jelly I made a trip to the regional Brookshire Brothers grocery store that anchored a small shopping center five minutes from our home. I worried I might not be able to find what we needed at the store but was surprised to come upon an entire section of an aisle at Brookshire Brothers that was devoted to canning and preserving. I had forgotten I lived in rural Texas where the homemade goodies sold in downtown Montgomery on the first Saturday of every month regularly included jellies, jams and preserves. Brookshire Brothers knew their market.

    Everything including the two cartons of twelve each one pint sparkling clear new Mason jars (now called Ball jars) was conveniently located in one place. It was as if the grocery store stockers knew my Aunt Mildred’s recipe verbatim, or did everyone make jelly with the same three ingredients…hm…I wondered how I had managed to live sixty-four years without attempting to make any kind of jelly. Just not my jam, I smiled to myself.

    The one exception the Brookshire Brothers aisle lacked was cheese cloth. Apparently no one knew cheese cloth was a necessity except my Aunt Mildred. After searching the entire store twice I resorted to asking the Customer Service woman behind the lottery tickets who not only recognized what cheese cloth was but also left her booth to show me where it was, and I was done. Since time was money and money was money, I made a mental note at checkout to keep a tally of the cost for our homemade plum jelly in case I decided to sell a homemade goody at the July first Saturday event. I had leapfrogged in my mind from making twenty-four jars of jelly to becoming a jelly entrepreneur. Keep cranking out the fruit, O Ye Plum Tree of Plenty.

    True to his word James brought several of his mother’s ancient gigantic aluminum pots and pans to my house the next day. A large wooden mortar and pestle paired with a tall cylindrical-shaped strainer added a dose of authenticity to our cooking implements the following Sunday afternoon. We laid everything out on my kitchen counter next to the mounds of plums in the baskets. James and I stared at the counters and then looked at each other.

    James Paul, as I knew him when we were children, was a handsome man in his mid-fifties. He wasn’t tall—less than six feet—and weighed maybe 135 pounds if he weighed after breakfast. He was a GQ male model size and an equally GQ sexy looking man. His salt-and-pepper short hair was more salt than pepper those days and matched the color of his thick mustache and small goatee. He cut the signature hair he wore during fifteen years of playing bass guitar and singing professionally with bands in honky-tonks, bars, juke joints and community halls around central Texas, he said, because the longer length got to be too much trouble. According to him the only time long hair was worth the effort was when he walked into a bar to make a statement, when he needed the “look.” Now he needed to make a different statement.

    Okay, I said. What’s next? He smiled that slow smile of his and struck a thoughtful pose. He stood quietly, looked around the kitchen, folded his arms, shifted his weight, and finally closed his eyes while I waited and wondered what in the world was going on with him. I assumed he needed a moment to collect his thoughts, but this was getting to be ridiculous. He slowly shook his head. I had a nagging suspicion my plum jelly enterprise was collapsing before it got off the kitchen floor.

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    Please stay tuned for Part 3, the final episode of The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree.

  • Shades of Green (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    Shades of Green (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    Our yellow framed Victorian style house looked deceptively small from Worsham street when Teresa and I first drove past it looking at houses in the area. A white picket fence marked the yard boundaries and appeared to be like others in the neighborhood which was a modest subdivision in a tiny Texas town called Montgomery. Our neighbor later told us four of the ten houses on the street including ours were moved here from another location, most likely a section of Houston known as the Heights. I liked to think we lived in a “rescued house” from the razing of entire blocks of single-family residences to make way for the multi-family condos and high-rise buildings in the Heights. Our rescued dogs would be a good fit, the picket fence a new adventure for them to explore. If houses had feelings I believed 609 Worsham would be a house of gratitude for being saved from demolition; Teresa and I were certainly grateful for it.

    The population of Montgomery when we moved there in 2010 was 489. The main street, Liberty Street, was then a small block of antique stores and real estate offices. The first Saturday of every month brought street vendors and musicians to Montgomery to sell nostalgia to a receptive group of transplanted Baby Boomers from the greater Houston area who roamed the town searching for entertainment, homemade goodies, farm fresh eggs, antique treasures. A jam session of seven old men took place on the porch of one of the vintage stores during the morning hours until the Texas heat got the best of them. Four played guitars, one played a banjo, another a mandolin, and the seventh member of the group played a genuine antique large tin round washtub with a long single string attached to a tall wooden pole in the middle of the tub. The old guy plucked the string like a bass, and the sound was a low rumble with a rhythmic beat. Each man took a turn at singing while sheet music was passed around to remind him of the words. The most ancient of them introduced by one of the guitar players as their eighty-nine-year-old “star” sang a poignant song about lost love. The six people including me in the audience clapped vigorously. I thought I was in a scene from The Andy Griffith Show.

    From my favorite vantage point, a white rocking chair on the front porch, I saw a world in shades of green. I saw lime green leaves beginning to form on two crape myrtle trees in our front yard, and I couldn’t wait to know what color the blossoms were going to be in the summer that first spring we were there. I saw forest green leaves of the majestic aged oak tree across our fence with branches bending toward Worsham street. This magnificent tall tree, the home of bluebirds and squirrels, harbored a host of other visiting birds that hid among the branches. I saw the yellow green leaves of another gigantic oak tree, this one across the street, but it grew strangely in all directions as if searching for its own center. I saw different blue greens of the weeping willow tree in my neighbor’s yard, the olive leaves of the pecan trees two houses down, the emerald green color of the grass growing in my front yard; verdant, lush hues of the Texas springtime captivated me as I rocked back and forth to my own rhythm.

    The people in the neighborhood were like different shades of green. The young mother who lived next door waited for the birth of a baby girl in the coming weeks while her youthful husband endured treatment for a brain tumor that had no cure. The middle-aged couple who lived on the other side of us, whose kindness to everyone was well known, recently lost their twelve-year-old Labrador retriever who had been with them since he was a puppy. The younger couple next door to them sold their house recently because they needed a larger space to provide for the new surprise baby they were expecting next month; their two teenagers weren’t thrilled about the baby or the move. Beyond them, a woman joyfully moved in with a man she met and fell in love with when she sought refuge from unhappiness with friends who lived across the street from him. Her friends were getting a divorce, their house was for sale, she was moving on. The woman across the street from us was not only a high school administrator but also a champion bronco rider in rodeos during the 1970s and 80s. She and the attractive woman in the house next door to her shared Teresa’s passion for antiques; both women had booths in the Antique Emporium on Liberty Street. The people on Worsham Street in my view mirrored the shades of green surrounding me: new life yellow greens, middle age lime greens, advanced age emerald greens, death the deep olive green that prematurely turned brown.

    Our house occupied a place in the middle of a short street in a small town in a big state. A rooster crowed throughout the day somewhere within hearing distance. At first, I thought it only crowed at dawn, as a proper rooster would do. Gradually I learned it crowed in varying intervals all day long. Now I waited for the bird’s last call at twilight. The unpredictable crowing reminded me there was no clear timetable for life. The spring shades of green splashed in random fashion, deepened in the summer, and then vanished as they made way for the mysteries of the autumn reds and golds. Something powerful would keep us here.

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    When Teresa and I bought the house on Worsham Street in Montgomery in 2010, we needed to help with the care of my mother who was in a Memory Care unit at a retirement facility in Houston. I was sixty-four years old that year so we also were exploring options that included our leaving South Carolina to move to Texas permanently. For a number of reasons I discuss in my book I’ll Call It Like I See It we sold the house in 2014 to neighbors who lived directly behind us, and I left Texas a second time to return to South Carolina; but I carried my Worsham Street friends with me in my heart.