Ole Sopchoppy

 Of bread pudding and Fiddle tunes

Johnclarestokes 

Mary Robinson Davis Rudd  1885-1960. My fathers first appointment to the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church was the tiny Mayberry-like town of Sopchoppy in Wakulla County in 1955. The panhandle town of under 600 was located on the banks of the crooked dark waters of the Sopchoppy River, which ran into the Oclockonee River, which ran into the Gulf at Panacea. My father preached one Sunday at Sopchoppy, then the next at the county seat of Wakulla in Crawfordville.  My mother taught fourth grade at the nearby native stone school and during the day Mrs Mary kept me. Mrs Mary and Mr Emory Rudd lived next door to the church and parsonage on Rose Street in a wooden one story white cracker style house with the two front rooms off the dog trot ending in the rear kitchen. I loved the time with the Rudd's, looking forward each morning to Mr Emory showing me the rats he had trapped in the barn the evening before, saving me his match boxes and Prince Albert tobacco tins to play with.  A good carpenter, Mr Emory made me a nice wooden high chair I could use to sit at the kitchen table with. Mrs Mary and we would walk about the yard and collect the eggs the chickens had laid in the barn and under the bushes in the yard. She would then make me my favorite food of all time, her special bread pudding.  It had to be the eggs I always assumed, for even to this day, the consistency has never been matched. Maybe the ingredient was nostalgia. Mr Emory was a fiddle player in a band with his first wife Susie that played down at the skating rink across the street on the Sopchoppy river and he liked to rock a horsey me on his foot and sing an old dance hall tune, though I’m not too sure Mrs Mary approved. They had a nice front porch swing under the shady magnolia where I would lazily lay and watch as the occasional car would pass or listen to Mr Burches marching band down at the field practicing. I knew mamma would be coming soon to get me. One morning in 1960, mamma told me I would not be going to Mrs Mary's today. I remember looking out the window in our living room to their house and seeing a hearse. I had never seen one but instinctively knew. That evening mamma and daddy took me over to the house and there Mrs Mary was, lying in wake in the front room in the bed, hands crossed, sleeping it seemed. . It was one of the first death's I had seen, yet somehow I understood at the age of five. Soon after I went to stay with Mrs Willie Mae Porter and her daughters across the street, then the beloved Angeline “Plump” Donaldson, who kept me in our home until we moved to Monticello in 1963. But of all the dear ladies who kept me, none were loved more than Mrs Mary. My heavenly food I know will not be manna but Mrs Mary’s bread pudding.