Not too long ago during the peak of the Coronavirus pandemic, when there was a severe shortage of toilet paper, some folks were having panic attacks. It was like, ‘How can life go on without toilet paper?’ My initial response was to chuckle, because I thought of the good old days, growing up in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s in the wonderful rural community of Dime Box, Texas, where everybody had an outhouse or privy equipped with a Sears Roebuck Catalogue and a stack of old newspapers. We didn’t have an indoor toilet with tissue paper luxury until my family moved to Giddings when I was 14.

There is a “falls” in Marble Falls, Texas, but no “marble”; the rock quarried near there is “granite,” which was used to build the present State Capitol in Austin, begun in 1882 and completed in 1888. I remember my high school Texas History teacher telling our class the fascinating story about building that grand old edifice in Austin. I’m not sure the history books included some of the things she told. Her accounts triggered my interest in granite.

Helping to make molasses out of sugarcane the old-timey way in the 1940’s was my first experience with the tall grass known as “sugarcane.” Since there are three types of sugar cane, — chewing cane, crystal cane, and syrup cane, — I’m guessing my father’s cousins in Carmine, Texas, were using “syrup” canes for making their strong, thick molasses. I was a pre-teen at the time, and my job was to carry bundles of sugarcane to the area where a poor old horse, attached to a pole, went around and around on a device that crushed and squeezed the sugarcane stalks. My job was easier than the horse’s.