So where do babies come from? Well, it’s complicated

Our friends and neighbors the Smiths were having a baby. I was excited about this and asked Ettu, my nurse, where they were going to get this new baby. She replied, “Just ask your mother. ... ” I asked Mama and she said, “Oh, the stork brings babies.” I asked if we couldn’t see about getting one, and Mama’s answer was, “I think not!”

I had no idea where to find a stork or how they could fly and carry a baby because the only big birds I knew about were our chickens in the coop out back, and they surely couldn’t bring one. That morning, when the three Cochran children came to play, I discussed it with Sonny because he was older than the rest and had been to school. Sonny said when his brother “Eddard” (Edward) came, his mama told him that she had sprinkled salt on the front steps so when the stork flew over the house, the bird knew they wanted one and dropped Eddard down the chimney.

When Ettu was busy working in the bedroom, I got the salt shaker from the table and the box of Morton’s from the cupboard and sprinkled all of it on the front steps. Daddy was really upset when he couldn’t salt his noon dinner. Ettu said, “We must be out. I’ll order some.”

After a while, when no baby came, I talked about it again with the Cochran children. Sonny said it might have been rice, not salt, because it had been a couple of years since Eddard came and he might have forgotten. Needless to say, the rice did not reproduce, either.

Sonny said he would ask his friend, Joe, since he had a new baby sister. Joe told Sonny he’d heard that parents had to get “nekkid” at the same time to get a baby.

Well, I just gave up. Because I knew for sure my parents wouldn’t do that. This was truly a hopeless cause.

Bettye Pittman, retired art teacher/supervisor with Memphis City Schools, joined a nonfiction writing class at the Lewis Senior Center in July 2011. This essay, “Salt, Rice and the S tork,” is one in a series of stories from her collection “Mississippi Monologues,” written for her daughter and depicting growing up in Corinth, Miss., in the 1930s. Bettye Pittman