‘Put More Water in the Soup’

READING HAZEL TISON’S new book over Thanksgiving weekend provided an extra helping of reasons to be grateful for growing up in Holmes County.

Put More Water in the Soup is the second collection of her columns published in the Holmes County Advertiser over the two decades since she retired as an English teacher at Bonifay Middle School. As the title suggests, most home folks were poor but hospitable. 

Still, she’s not eager to relive the good old days.

“A definition of nostalgia I like,” she writes, “is remembering with pleasure a time we would not go back to, even if we could.”

This book — like her first collection, Better Times a Comin’, from two years ago — is full of familiar names and places and simple pleasures. She fondly recalls sitting on the front porch as a newlywed and learning from a group of older ladies “who was who and what was what” and “who had a baby too few months from the wedding date.”

She has lived all of her 93 years near Bonifay and taught many middle school students from Esto. As a child herself, growing up on Route 1, she writes: “We didn’t quite live on God’s Little Acre, but we weren’t too far from Tobacco Road.”

She remembers when Saturday was the big day in town.

“Stores stayed open until 9 p.m. Farmers and others came into town to shop at Evans and Joe Scheinburg’s, which were almost institutions,” she writes. “Parking along Waukesha was on a slant, no parallel parking. Many people drove downtown on Saturday just to sit in the car and watch the people.”

She captures the way the locals talked, and some of their unusual sayings and words, including “terreckly.”

“There was a fair amount of difference,” she writes, “in ‘terreckly,’ which meant ‘maybe I’ll get around to it after a while,’ and ‘directly,’ which I thought meant right away.”

Put More Water in the Soup is available locally at Pepper Town Market in Bonifay, or on Amazon.