The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson

I especially remember one little incident that took place in our home when I was three. Most of the things I remember from my early childhood have been almost forgotten and I now remember them through special effort and recall. But this one brief moment has lived with me and was never put aside to be recalled later.

Mama was sitting in a chair in our living room. Albert was in her lap getting his natural milk breakfast. I was in a hurry for the baby to get through nursing so I could play with him down on the floor. In the meantime, I was standing leaning against Mama and playing with the baby—playing with his hands and feet, rubbing and patting his "tummy," and sometimes tickling him to make him laugh.

Now all this activity caused a lot of wiggling and squirming in Mama's lap. And it also caused a lot of letting go of, and getting back to, the baby's morning meal. This kind of playing with the baby might have aggravated some mothers and might have brought a word of scorn, or at least an expression of impatient dissatisfaction from them, but not from this mother. She was one of a kind. She seemed to enjoy it all. She was my Mama.

I was standing on Mama's left. When Albert finished and was full, Mama stood him down on the floor on her right. And while he was standing there holding to her dress for support, before Mama put his breakfast away, back into her blouse, she looked over at me and very motherly asked, "Now, do you want some of the baby's milk?"

I didn't say a word. I just bashfully backed away a step or so and looked up at her and thought something like, "That's for the baby, not for me."

For the first time in my life I was consciously aware of my mother's love for me, in that brief moment, because of that simple little gesture. The poet expressed it better than I can, when he wrote, ". . .the love of a mother for her son that transcends all other affections of the soul." I was deeply moved by the thought that, although she had another little one to hold closely and love and nourish, she had not pushed me aside. Her love included me too.

As the years went by, sometimes all seemed hopeless and I would ask myself, "What the heck? Who cares anyway?" And always that little three-year-old kid would give me the answer, "Mama does."

I remember the windmill by our garden and the water tank way up high on the tower. When the wind blew and the mill was pumping water, we could open a faucet at the top of the well and get a drink of fresh cold water. We had a tin cup hanging on a nail on the windmill tower to drink out of. And we kept some water hanging up on our back porch in a wooden water bucket made out of cedar. There was a dipper in the bucket that we all drank out of.

Once when Papa was building his big barn at the Flint place, before he got it finished, a strong wind hit it and leaned it way over, but it didn't blow it all the way down. Papa took a block and tackle and got some men to help him and they pulled it back up straight.

Our house had three rooms. One of them was a kitchen and dining room together. There was a long porch at the front of the house and an L-shaped porch on the back. There were flower beds and flowers in our front yard, and morning glory vines on the front yard fence and china trees in the back yard. They made good shades to play in.