The years that followed brought many difficult hardships to Uncle Tom and his new family, and looking back and remembering the old days and the stressful tasks they endured, I wonder how they coped with them. The house didn't have any water and Uncle Tom had to haul water from a spring about two miles away on their neighbor's land. They were good neighbors and let them have all the water they wanted, for the spring never went dry. Uncle Tom would load wooden barrels in the wagon, pulled by mules or horses. Earl can remember going with him for the water; he must have been about three or four years old. Uncle Tom drew the water from the spring with a bucket tied to a long rope and filled the barrels.

After a time he dug a cistern close to their house. He put rain gutters on the house to catch the rain water and send it into the cistern. When it didn't rain for awhile the cistern would go dry and again he had to haul water. Earl remembers his mama (Nell) drawing water from the cistern with a rope and bucket for drinking, cooking, washing dishes, clothes and for bathing. They took a bath in the washtub, the same tub she used to wash clothes. She did the laundry by putting a rub board in the tub and used a big bar of soap, usually homemade lye soap. For the really dirty clothes, like Uncle Tom's work clothes, she used a large, black pot called a wash pot. She filled the pot with water and built a fire under and around it. When the water boiled she took a long stick, she called a punching stick, and punched the clothes around. This boiling action was similar to the agitation of a washing machine.

Nell made a garden every year and grew most of their food. Big Mama and Pa helped and they grew enough for all of them. Uncle Tom and Pa also had an orchard and raised peaches, plumbs, figs and other fruit. They would raised extra food for canning. Nell and Big Mama would put the food in fruit jars and put them in a pressure cooker. Then they had food during the winter. This was their only way of preserving food for they had no refrigerator or freezer. They wouldn't have done them much good anyway, for they had no electricity.

Just about all of their food came from the farm; Uncle Tom always raised about a half acre of sorghum cane for making sorghum molasses. He and Pa would cut the stalks of cane and load them on the wagon and take them to a syrup mill. They didn't have enough money to pay the man for making the syrup so they paid him with a percentage of what was made. This method of payment was used for other things also, such as for grinding corn into meal. Uncle Tom would take a wagon load of corn to a grinding mill in Cooper to be ground into corn meal and pay the man with a percentage of the meal. He also had beehives that produced enough honey for them and Pa and Big Mama.

He always had hogs for meat and sometimes a calf. Uncle Tom and Pa would kill and butcher them. Everyone always looked forward to this day for the fresh meat. It always had to be on a cold day so the meat would not spoil. They boiled the hog fat in a washpot to make lard. Nell used it for all her cooking. After they cut up the meat they persevered it by rubbing it with a salt-like substance called sugar cure. The sugar cured meat would last throughout the winter but had to be eaten before hot weather. They also raised sweet potatoes that would last through the winter. Uncle Tom had a way to persevere them by digging a hole in the ground and putting hay in it. He laid the sweet potatoes on the hay and covered them with more hay, then cover it with sheet iron. He also had chickens and lots of eggs; sometimes they had extra eggs to sell. 

They had a few cows and always had plenty of milk and butter and Uncle Tom sold some of the milk. Pat Ayles, Uncle Tom's uncle, had a milk route. Pat and Winnie (Granny's sister) lived about a mile south of them; they could look across the field and see their house. Pat would come by in an old flat bed truck and pick up the cans of milk, five and ten gallon cans. Sometimes his daughter Virginia, would come with him to help and sometimes she ran the route by herself. The money from the sale of the milk sure helped them out.

Later many farmers bought a cream separator; it would separate the cream from the milk. Once a week, usually on Saturday, they would go to Cooper and take the cans of cream to a creamery and sell it. Later they sometimes shipped the cans of milk by train from Paris to the Sooner Creamery in Oklahoma City.  

When Earl was five years old his mama told him that they were going to get him a little sister. He asked where they were getting her from. Since he was too young to know about the birds and the bees she told him they had ordered her from the Sears Roebuck mail order catalog. She knew he understood about the catalog for they ordered a lot of things from it. Earl opened the catalog to the little girls clothing section and saw a pretty little girl and said to his mama, "I hope it's this one." She looked and saw the girl was modeling Kerrybrook dresses, so she decided to name her either Kerry or Brook. When she was born she named her Kerry.