The Christmas Season takes me back to my 9 member family. There were 3 boys and 4 girls and Dad and Mother. I was born in 1938, and times were hard back then. I am the only remaining member of my childhood family.
I grew up on a little family farm. We had about 2 acres. We had 2 barns, a corn rib, a chicken house, an orchard, a large garden area and a fenced-in area for the pigs. My father owned a pasture adjacent to our house where we kept a cow and a calf and 2 old white horses named Bill and Don. The cow didn’t have a name.
There was a creek on that property where the cow could get a drink. We didn’t have electricity until 1948. We had no running water, indoor plumbing or bathroom. We got our water from a well that never ran dry.
Every few years, dad would dig a hole and build a new toilet away from the house. Sometimes he would build a 3-seater, but it was usually 2! Imagine sharing such an intimate moment with another family member! There was no toilet paper, and a stack of newspapers in the corner stood us in good stead.
We raised much of our own food. The gardens were huge, and everyone helped to can vegetables all season. The canning went on outside. The boys would build a huge wood fire, and we would fill the tub from the well, get the water boiling, and keep the fire hot until the vegetables were ready. We stored them in a dugout under the house—which never froze and was available for food all winter. We used glass canning jars.
We kept a large sow, and unfortunately, her babies which were always my pets ended up on the table in the forms of pork chops, bacon, ham. As a kid, I felt like a cannibalism eating my pets!
On slaughter day, I spent much time under the bed crying.
Dad had a smokehouse where he smoked the meat, and it could remain outside, frozen in the smoke shed, all winter until needed.
We had an ice box in the cellar in the same area as the vegetables. And the ice man came once or twice a week leaving a large block of ice. He had kids of his own and knew kids! So he would shave off a sliver of ice for each of us. And to us, it was as good as candy!
We had a chicken house, too. And chickens. But I didn’t like chickens. They were free range chickens, and they left droppings that bare feet could step on! Ugh! Chickens were not there just for ornamentation. Someone could be running around the yard at breakfast and on the table for lunch!
Of course, we had our own eggs! My job in preparing the chicken for table was taking off the feathers after the chicken had been dipped in hot water. Pugh!! Then Mother would cut up the chicken on a table set up outside. The hunting dogs were treated to little tidbits like gizzards.
The chicken parts were fried in lard—rendered from the pigs.
We had an orchard, so we had plenty of fruit. There wasn’t enough fruit to can for winter be a we ate it all fresh off the trees!
In our vegetable garden, we had just about everything you can imagine—potatoes, onions, green beans, tomatoes, peas, corn. It was a BIG garden. Dad had the garden turned over in the Spring by a neighbor farmer, and then Dad took over with his little hand plow. It was expected of kids that they would pull weeds in the summer.
My Dad was a prodigious mushroom hunter. He would come home from the woods with a tub full! Can you imagine, I actually got tired of eating mushrooms!
Another job the kids had was churning butter. We didn’t have a fancy churn. Each kid has his own 5-gallon jar, which was filled about two-thirds full of milk. We just sat and shook it back and forth while the butter formed! So you would produce around 3 inches of butter at the top of your jug, and beneath would remain wonderful buttermilk. Best buttermilk I ever tasted! It took most of the morning to get the butter churned. Mother would save the butter and the buttermilk in the cellar. The buttermilk went on a shelf and the butter in the ice box. We probably churned once a week.
But oh! We thought we were eating angels’ food! When big loaves of homemade yeast bread would come out of the oven, slathered with that homemade butter and blackberry jelly (we covered blackberry picking in another blog post), it was as good as candy to me. (Which we didn’t have much of!)
During the war (WWII), many foods were rationed. So much of our summer was spent in procuring and preparing food for winter.
My father was a deep vein coal miner. We lived in western Indiana, and coal was prolific. Our house was heated with coal. We usually had a big pile of coal in the back yard. The pigs loved to eat coal. And I loved to give it to them! I was forbidden to give coal to the pigs. But on that point, I was an errant child! And I would give them a few small hunks.
We didn’t spend much time flower gardening. It was only later in my life that I learned the joy of flower gardening.
My mother had a coal burning cook stove. There was a reservoir on one end which we filled with water for washing dishes. You can imagine the heat in the kitchen in summer. Since we had no electricity, we had no fans! But people had to eat. So we didn’t spend much time in the kitchen. My poor mother did. I can only imagine her joy when she finally got an electric stove!
This blog was inspired by questions from my eldest granddaughter who wanted to know some things about my childhood. My husband’s family would have had electricity sooner than we did because they lived in town. The Rural electricity program was introduced by the government in 1948.
Thoughts From the Garden 