Washing Day and Other Sharecropper's Stories Audiobook by Dick Meadows

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Title: Washing Day and Other Sharecropper's Stories

Author: Dick Meadows

Narrator: Dick Meadows

Format: Unabridged

Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-22-16

Publisher: Dick Meadows

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs

Publisher's Summary:

"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches." - Robert Frost

Frost wrote about it, but I never knew that until I was in graduate school. As a rider of saplings during my boyhood I had no idea that this simple pleasure had been immortalized in "birches". Frost wrote of the look of the trees. I remember how they feel. I can't be certain if someone showed me how to ride a sapling or if I discovered it while playing alone, like Frost's birch rider, "Some small boy too far from town to learn baseball, whose only play was what he found himself, summer or winter, and could play alone". Perhaps a cousin or a neighbor my age taught me the game. Maybe some athletic impulse caused me to climb a sapling, kick my feet free from a supportive limb and throw myself out into space for the swift swing to Earth. What fun! And it was so available in the woods around the farm where we were sharecroppers.

My stories describe a lifestyle that has all but disappeared from American culture. My hope is that the listener will enjoy learning about the work and play of a large family living on a tenant farm without electricity, running water or indoor plumbing - but on washing day, there was a washing machine that had been dreamt about for years! A luxury we could hardly afford. We heated our homes with wood and coal and cooked with propane, and I remember doing homework by the light of kerosene lamps. But most importantly, I want to share the complicated relationship between father and son, which is timeless and universal.

Contact me for any questions: [email protected]