William and Hazel Searcy and their 70 pound watermelon!

Hazel Clements Searcy was my grandmother. She was one of the hardest working women I’ve ever know with some of the cutest little antics and songs she would sing. She taught me many of the old ways of doing things on the farm during the many summers I stayed with her and my sweet Granddaddy. We would rise early at 6 AM everyday. Chores included milking the cow, washing clothes on a wringer washing machine out by the smoke house, hanging them on the line, canning vegetables from the field that granddaddy brought in, shelling peas, creaming corn, cooking, making lye soap, setting milk to rise and churning butter. She was quite a cook and made delicious tea cakes and blackberry cobblers! She enjoyed her days working at the Inaha Road Stuckey’s behind the snack bar, too! Traveler’s on I 75 going to Florida for their vacations would stop by again and again just to see her and have a cup of coffee or a hamburger. She loved to talk to her customers. Often times I would have to go to work with her and sit behind the bar, but sometimes the store manager would let me cut up pieces of their delicious pecan clusters and I would serve samples to customers, too! She was a great seamstress and would sew while singing to the beat of her Singer treadle sewing machine. She was also a devoted Christian and Methodist. In my younger years she attended Prospect Methodist Church out in the country near her parents home, but in her later years she and Granddaddy went to Sycamore Methodist Church. She was quite a “sport model” and very much loved.