Maud could do everything fast. When I was a child there were still five boys at home, all working with their father at the mill as well as some garden and farm work. They were all big people by then but she still did almost all the cooking, cleaning, laundry for them all. Of course, since she didn’t have any daughters at home by then, Hubert might sometimes assign a son to "help your mother" if her need was great.
I remember one day watching her patch overalls. It was amazing to see how fast she made that needle move to sew on that patch. When she died, my mother got for me a thimble of hers which I treasure. It has several holes punched all the way through by pushing those needles through heavy fabric so many times.
She had a foot pedal operated sewing machine but patching was done by hand. How it looked was not so important, but sewing it to stay on was and getting it finished was important because dinner had to be cooked.
By this time the men’s clothes were purchased ready made, because by then they were much more affluent, but in the earlier days she also made a good part of their clothes. My mother said that Maud was not really a good seamstress in that the emphasis was on making it sturdy and getting it finished, not on the decorative aspects.
Probably Maud’s cooking followed her general pattern of work, "Don’t get fancy, just do the basics very well." As time went by she may have enjoyed branching out more as far as cooking. I remember a strawberry shortcake that was the best! It was several thin layers of cake with strawberries between each layer and rich cream on top. Marilyn Martin Hamlet says her coconut cake was the best she had ever eaten.
Most of the family remember that Maud’s cooking was great! My brother, Charles, remembers her biscuits. I remember smelling that pot of beans simmering in an iron pot on the fireplace. As was true in most homes in that area in those days, the food was basically what was raised in their gardens and from farm animals.
When I think of how she started each day, she probably did more work by 9:00 a.m. than most of us do all day. She would get up and make breakfast which would consist of a pan full of biscuits – the pan Hoyle says was about 18" x 24" and the biscuits were about two inches thick. To go along with this would be fried salt pork, eggs, gravy, sorghum molasses and butter, homemade jams and jellies. The men would often be preparing to go far away to the mill site. (The sawmill was somewhat portable, so could be moved to where the timber was.) She would pack food for their noon meal which would include a cake freshly baked every day. Many times this would probably be a molasses cake to cut down on the sugar they had to buy.