Dressed to kill.....

For a Sunday-School teaching, God-fearing, member of the Order of the Eastern Star farm wife, my grandmother was plenty tough. I think she had to be.

My grandparents used to have boarders during hunting season; men from out-of-town (mostly near Philadelphia), would come and stay at the big farmhouse for several days during doe and buck season. This photo was from a hunter named Joe and was taken in December 1956 (the back of the photo was inscribed). This particular hunter went home without his buck and signed off, “Better Luck Next Year.”

My grandfather by this point did not hunt (nor did my grandmother) as he was too busy with this farming chores and slowing down from the crippling effects of arthritis. Not sure why Orpha was holding the gun (there is the chance they were about to head out to the smokehouse to kill something for supper), but more-than-likely she was just holding it for posterity. I never saw her shoot anything, but she did cook up a mess of critters and wild game. And made a mean applesauce from the apple trees in the back yard.

And I never, ever saw her in anything but a dress – her “Sunday go-to-meeting” dresses, as she called them, and her everyday working house dresses, which could also double as her gun-totin’ dress.