DELLA’S APRON

The way I sat around and let my daughters do most of the work while we were in NC reminds me of one of the stories my mother-in-law used to tell about her grandmother, Delaware Olivia Vandalia Ellis Bailey.

This interesting woman, called Della for short, was married to the son of a chaplain in the Confederate Army and was raised in Kentucky. Her husband was a country doctor who made the rounds by horse and buggy from a farm outside of Bowling Green. They had nine children, three boys and six girls, one of whom was grandmother to the genius.

Like many of the women of her era, Della always called her husband Dr. Bailey. (It’s amazing to me that they ever got close enough to have children with a formality like that.) Anyway, one story I heard my mother-in-law tell many times was that when Della reached the ancient age of forty, she told her family that she had cooked and cleaned for them for all of her married years and it was now time for them to take care of her. So she took off her apron and sat down.

Now I don’t know if she continued to do this or if the tale was exaggerated or not, but I do know that Della’s apron, a long white one with no bib, hung in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, and she would occasionally wear it when washing dishes or cooking. It hung down to about mid-calf and certainly was adequate in protecting her other clothes.

But the fact that the apron was in very good condition lends credence to the story that she quit keeping house after her fortieth birthday. Incidentally, she lived to be in her eighties.