Cream and Sugar – December 08, 2002
In 1934 Therin and Reta Hyde moved to the wilderness in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Work was hard to find in those days. This great nation of ours was in the midst of enormous change that left many families wanting for food and shelter. But Therin found work in the Nevada mines. So the two of them, soon to be three, moved into a small cabin furnished with a wood-burning stove, a rope-strung bed, a rickety table, and two chairs.
Therin worked nights, making his way on foot through the woods with a lantern and lunch bucket, while his bride of only a year slept alone. She recalls moving a stone to hold the crooked door shut, and the snow blowing in through the gaps. Most winter nights the coyotes would stop their howling and sniff around the cabin, pushing their snouts through the cracks in the door. More than once, Reta would get up in the night and push the stone back against the door. Therin, exhausted from the nights shoveling coal, would go without sleep one day and fix the door so it fit tightly and had a proper latch. Reta says she slept better after that.
The snows deepened that year. Food was hard to get. And the wages only provided for the necessities. Reta made a quilt from scraps of discarded fabric. Therin said he slept better after that.
With the snows came Christmas. Reta and Therin would celebrate their first Christmas together alone. Without the means to travel home to see family, they did the best they could to make a home of the rented cabin. Reta cut pine boughs and strung dried berries. Therin fixed the rickety table. And they both decided that they wouldn’t exchange gifts; there just wasn’t enough money.
But on Christmas morning Reta found two small packages resting in the pine boughs. They were carefully wrapped in grease paper and string. Tearfully she opened them, half trying to scold Therin for being frivolous. What she unwrapped were two small crystal pitchers—one for the cream and one for sugar. Therin explained that while they could rarely afford cream or sugar, the two went so well together that when they were able to fill them, it would always remind them that no matter what they had or didn’t have, Reta and Therin, husband and wife, went together.
Sixty years later, Therin died. Reta moved to a smaller apartment close to her grandchildren so they could bring the great grandchildren over and listen to her stories of growing up in Nevada, Salt Lake City, and Cincinnati. And they always ask about the small crystal pitchers, how they are the only Christmas gift she has kept all these years, and how cream and sugar were always meant to be together.
Program #3825