Growing Up - Ages 3-6 - Part Two

There are so many things that come to mind as I think back on yesteryear. The first house I can remember was about two and one half feet off the ground. It was held up on rock piers with no underpinning so we could crawl under it and play when it would rain. The chickens and rooster would go under the house. Sometimes the tail feathers of the old big roster would stick up through the cracks in the fire room. We would grab onto the feathers just to hear him holler. One night mom had to go to the outhouse which was in the back of the house and down a path; she did not have any light. When she sat down she felt that something was there inside! She reached her hand over to the corner and about the time she did, the old big red roster tried to fly out. You can imagine the shock she had being in the outhouse when it was pitch black. She never went back to that out house after dark with out a light again.

I never did but some of the guys in town would go out on Halloween night and slide the outhouse back a little so when someone would go in the dark they would almost fall in. The country boys would take a buggy apart and put it back together on the roof of some one's house; that was good clean fun. We did not get to trick-or-treating back then since we were way back in the country and it really did not get started until around 1950. I remember that it was all tricks on October 31. Listen to me tell this story.

Thanksgiving was the time we would all go hunting to kill a turkey if we could find one. If we were unsuccessful, we would roast a big 'ol hen and cook country ham along with all the vegetables that we had from the summer. When we had to depend completely on what we grew, it sure made us thankful to our Lord that He provided for us. We never missed a meal, sometimes it would look like we may but God always came through.

After Christmas, the little wagon one that is still vivid in my memory, we moved from the Propst Farm to the Oswalt Farm which was about twenty miles away. Spring came and we found out that the cold weather did not have an effect on the old pump. It was just worn out; you could pump on it all day and not get but a couple gallons of water out of it. There was a spring with lots of water about a quarter a mile down a hill and that is where we had to carry water for everything. It was my job to carry water for the household. I remember that we had wooden floors and they had to be scrubbed with a large brush and flushed down with water. All day long on floor scrubbing day I would have to carry two buckets to and from the spring to get water. Now I realized why the rain barrel was set where it was, remember when I jumped into what I thought was a barrel full of pea hulls? That too is still vivid in my memory! It was not long before we had rain barrels set under everything that had rain water runoff. I am sure that experience is the reason I cannot ever waste water.  Listen to me tell this story.

We only stayed at this farm one year because the ground was so poor that it would just grow weeds which made our crops were very slim. We about starved to death! If it was not for the rabbits and squirrels we would trap or shoot and for fish that we could catch out of the creek about a mile away, I guess we would have died of starvation. We did have an old cow but that year she was getting too old to give much milk. That winter we had corn bread and milk at supper time about every night. Mother bought a one hundred pound sack of pinto beans for three dollars and that got us through the winter along with the other things. We did kill a hog which gave us some meat and lard for cooking. The chickens were lazy that year; I guess we did not feed them very well so we were short on eggs. We ate pork, corn meal mush, and always had good homemade biscuits with butter and a lot of jellies, jams, and molasses.