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Memories of Golde Dicks Markham (1996) Golde Markham Dicks 45/125

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Our house was always a busy place, but I have fond memories of my mother finding
time to play with us. One game she played was called “Hello!” with a ball she had made.
Everybody wore long black knitted stockings in those days. She always kept them when
we’d wear them out. On a rainy day, she’d unravel those stockings and started a round ball.

She put a rubber object in the center so the ball would bounce. Ma just kept unraveling and
winding the thread on that tiny little ball and sometimes sew through the ball to keep the
threads from slipping off.

When the ball was finished, we got on either side of the house and threw the ball to the
other side, calling out “Hello!” We kids thought this was a wonderful game!
On many Sunday afternoons we’d walk down to the branch. A certain kind of oak tree

grew up the hill from the branch. Around Easter, these oaks grew little green balls about the
size of a Ping-Pong ball. Ma taught us how to puncture a little hole the size of a pencil into
the stem end of the ball. Inside was a fine webbing—like a spider web. We used a hairpin to

ease out that webbing and then cleaned it out good. This produced the best whistle by
blowing out one side of that hole.
In the late fall of the year, sitting around the fire, we played another game using
berries. After Ma had gathered berries in the woods, she gave each of us ten. We closed our

fist with a certain number and asked someone else how many we had in our hand. If the
other person guessed “five,” we had to give up two berries to make five. If he guessed three

correctly, he got the three berries. Whoever had the most berries at the end of the game won
the game. This game entertained us and also taught us math.
Our farm had many coveys of quail. Ma once asked her father, Grandpa Tyre—who
could make just about anything—to make a bird trap. Grandpa made one about four feet

long, twenty inches high, and twenty inches wide. He built the cage using two-by-two
boards—an oblong box frame covered over with chicken wire. At one end he put a wire

tunnel going up to the middle of the frame, tapering down to an opening just large enough so
the birds could walk through at the end of the tunnel. But when the quail walked through the
tunnel and then stood up in the cage, they had to stoop down to get back in the tunnel, and
they didn’t have sense enough to squat down to go through the tunnel to get out. Grandpa

put shelled com into the trap for bait.
One Sunday afternoon, Ma said, “Let’s go check the bird trap to see if we got any

birds.”
I can clearly remember that day. I just knew that there were so many birds in that trap
that they were going to fly away with it! We had trapped twenty-seven quail in that cage. It

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