Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) by Olive Ann Burns

you know like per-fume comes in? I spray it all over my kitchen and dinin’ room. They say flies jest cain’t stand it, the smell, I mean. My husband says he cain’t stand it either, and I ain’t sure it heps, but the
Progressive Farmer
magazine said so. What you think, Mr. Tweedy?”
    â€œSince your husband don’t like lavender water, try using blue tablecloths. Flies really hate the color blue.” They knew I was joking. “Or try to get you some screens for the windows.”
    â€œI know a lady got screens,” said the woman, “and she is forever chasin’ after flies with a swatter. You git screens, them flies cain’t git out.”
    That just about covers my experience with county agenting. On October 2, 1917, I got fired.
    ***
    In actual fact I was asked to take up a state job with the Agricultural Extension Service.
    In the new job I traveled over the whole state, helping farmers and students learn how to build barns and silos and chicken houses, put in drainage ditches, and so forth.
    One of my first assignments was at Young Harris College in Towns County. Boys studying agriculture had put up framing for a cow barn, and their professor wanted me to come cut the pattern for a gambrel roof—which I didn’t know how to do. I found blueprints for a dairy barn but not for any gambrel roof. So I went out to Banks County to see old Mr. Luthie Fletcher, a carpenter. He used to take me fishing on the Hudson River when I was a boy. I said to him, “Mr. Luthie, let’s go up to the mountains next Monday. I got to mark off timbers for a barn roof, but if you hep me, we can get in some fishin’.”
    I didn’t tell him I’d never designed a gambrel roof. I put the emphasis on time to fish.
    We got to Young Harris real early Monday morning and I handed him a pencil and said, “Now, Mr. Luthie, I’ll look over my blueprints while you mark off timbers for a pattern. Do it light, and then I’ll mark over them again while the students watch.” Mr. Luthie grinned at me. He knew what I was up to. But he marked the timbers light, and when the boys arrived, I’d ask one to bring me a plank and I’d go over the marks, and pretty soon me and Mr. Luthie were off fishing.
    When we got back to Young Harris, those students had cut and mounted the timbers and were ready to nail on the tin. Prettiest thing you ever saw. The president of the college wrote me a letter saying it all fit just perfect.
    People wanted blueprints for everything, houses and privies, barns and chicken houses. The president of the Central of Georgia Railroad had a farm at Orchard Hill and he wanted a concrete silo. I’d never even seen one. Silos had always been made out of wood. I didn’t know what I’d do, but I just happened to see an ad in the paper for a company in Atlanta that had started selling steel forms for concrete silos. I got to Atlanta early the next morning and presented myself as a representative of the University of Georgia’s Agricultural School.
    â€œWe’re doin’ a demonstration project at Orchard Hill for the president of the Central of Georgia Railroad,” I said, “and I think it would be the best advertisement in the world for y’all if you’d build it with your new form.”
    The day they started on it we had a crowd of farmers over there. The steel form was like a doughnut with a big hole. They’d pour in the concrete, let it set up, then raise the form and pour in some more. They did that over and over, clear to the top.
    If that silo is still standing, it’s got my name on it. I scratched it in the concrete. I thought about adding Sanna’s name to mine, but I didn’t do it, even though I had already asked her to marry me. But all that came later.

9
    I SPENT the week after the watermelon cutting hoping that Miss Sanna Klein would get cold feet and not go to Jefferson, in which case