Well Dressed in a Feed Sack...

Dolly Pardon had her Coat of Many Colors her mama made for her and I had my livestock feed sack dresses of many colors my mama made for me....

I still remember as if it were only yesterday... The fall of 1947…my first day of school.

I got up early, all excited, because I was going to school! Not only was I going to school, but I also had six brand new dresses my mama had made for me. I was just amazed at the thought of having so many new dresses at the same time.

 My dresses didn't come from any big department store. They were not a special order from Sears and Roebuck...and they were not bought from the general store in my hometown. My mama made them. Each one of them had been sown with material acquired by livestock feed and flour sacks she had saved all year. However, that was not a problem for me…I didn’t know there was anything else.

Most of her days were spent in the fields working with my dad and often at night while the rest of the family was sleeping, mom would be sewing by the light of an oil lamp. I remember there were times the light would awaken me and I would see my mother sitting there all alone in the early hours of morning…sometimes nodding her head because she had fallen asleep. Other times she would be hand-sewing rickrack in place; or, possibly little strands of ribbon around the collar and sleeves of each dress, scraps she had bought for three or four cents from the cast off stuff at J.J Newberry’s Five and Dime store.    

The day I walked in the classroom with my hair tightly plaited in pigtails, donned in one of those little dresses, stepping high in my brand new Buster Brown shoes and white socks, wearing a pair of flour sack bloomers, I felt like the richest kid alive…

I often think of my early childhood. My parents had hard times on the farm in those days, but we were a happy well-adjusted family. It was a time when things we had were all appreciated and not once did we complain because we didn’t have more. It is now that I realize what my mother gave to me. How she gave those hours of bone-tired, back breaking work to see that I had what I needed to be a happy little girl on my first day of school. We have no greater love on this earth than the love of a mother…That is the way I see it!

Have a blessed day in the Lord;
Mary Frances King

She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness..*Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her…

Proverbs 31:27-28