Butchering Day

On the chopping block...

I remember the last time my family butchered chickens.  I was three years old.

I had spent the summer wandering around our yard, curious about the woods, but afraid to explore them yet.

The smell:  hot water mixed with chicken blood and feathers in the old copper boiler...

Running around the adults as they dispatched bird after bird, I stayed away, keeping a distance so I could see, but not so close at to get in the way.  I was told "don't get close" - sharp knives, hot water, blood and guts.

My grandmother and mother took them after their heads were cut off and they were hung up to bleed out. Grandma and Mom did the butchering in the yard right outside the kitchen, between the house and woods, just east of the big tree swing.  They worked on a table of planks over some saw horses; the birds were gutted, sliced open and bare hand reaching in, organs pulled out.  Smokey the cat milled around not far away, hoping for some fresh giblets.  Next they were put in the hot water, to help with removing the feathers. Final step was rinsing them inside and out.  In the end, they had went from feathered friend, to Sunday dinner, all in an afternoon...

I didn't know it then, but it was a sort of initiation.  I now knew what fewer people know nowadays: Where my food comes from.  My family didn't do it to save the earth, or eat healthier, but because they needed to, to get by. Our family was able to help themselves by having a garden, some livestock, and skills to process them into healthy delicious food on our table. What a blessing!

Putting Up and Putting By

In our basement, which was just rough cement walls and floor, was a root cellar left from the days when there wasn't a proper basement under the house when my grandparents built it in 1906. Later in the 1950s came the basement. My parents continued to use the dark cellar for potatoes and carrots, and other root vegetables. But my mother also had many shelves, and they were very full when I was very little. Over the years she did less and less when it was only me and Dad, and my sisters had grown and left. She took her first full-time out-of-the-home job in 1974 to help attain some financial goals her and Dad had before he retired in 1987. She still canned even then, but only as little as possible. She began experimenting with freezing some vegetables. I will never forget the many meals we had during many long, dark winters with food she and Dad grew and then put up. That was the beginning of my 'pickiness' about food; if it wasn't as good as Mom's, it wasn't good enough...

Clotheshorse

The Clotheshorse, aka drying rack. I grew up using one, and have had one one off and all my life. I now am using it exclusively for all my winter drying and to supplement my clothesline drying in the summer when necessary. It saves a considerable amount of money on our monthly electric bill, and provides much needed (and appreciated) humidity in the home...

Old-Style Hacking

When I was a little girl, our 'sidewalks' were made out of wood.

To be more exact, the sidewalk was made out of what my Mom and Dad called "grain doors".

When it rained, they were as slippery as snot, which I found out by running on them, only to slip and fall hard on my backside.

Before my folks put the grain doors down, there was no sidewalk at all.  The doors were what people nowadays would call a hack - a creative solution to a need, often using recycled products.  Back then it was called common sense and making do.

Tea Granny

Nothing stopped Grandma from Hanging Clothes!

My grandmother, and all her friends, used to get a kick out of my love of tea. I would insist on my milk in it, as taught to me by Grandma, and of course three sugar-spoon spoonfuls of sugar, mixed just right...then I would ceremoniously and most carefully sip my tea spoon by spoon, blowing on it a wee bit to cool, then slurp it up with gusto. "You're quite the tea granny, Patricia Kaye," Grandma or Toots would say, as I sat at the little table in the kitchen.

It was right by the back door with the frosted glass showing a scene of a hunter with his dog in the woods. Behind that door was the back porch, with the wringer washer and the slop pail. That's where Grandma put all her vegetable and fruit peelings, etc., and it had a complex organic odor that I didn't dislike, but definitely identified as uniquely Grandma's. She would use it on her garden in the spring, mixing it in to help the next batch of vegetables grow. She had a small garden by her outbuildings, a line of small sheds in the back yard, ending with an outhouse.

Looking out the back door was her clothes line, which she used year round, even in the winter. I learned from her that clothes could also 'freeze dry' just like coffee! I even have a photo of her standing in a boat hanging clothes during a flood.

I tell you, nothing could keep my Grandma down. She was a stubborn and persevering Irish woman if there ever was one. Life experience had taught her that if you want something done it's best to do it yourself, that God helps those that helps themselves, and that hard work never hurt anyone.

She had a lovely touch about her that people remembered for years afterward, whether it was because they had stayed at her Fitzpatrick maternity home under her care, or knew her as a town resident and neighbor in another capacity. Her friends could count on her, and she was generous with her hospitality and time. I knew her for far too short a time, and of that for even shorter when she was still in her prime; but I remember enough to have been inspired down through the years by her, and feeling very blessed to have known her, and to have had many days and even nights where I spent them with her and got to see her make many things with her hands - amazing baked goods, knitted mittens, embroidered dish towels, scrumptious meals, or ingenious wheelbarrows made out of what was at hand (including tricycle wheels for the front wheel...).

She had a strong large body, and wore her hair long all her life, always up in a top bun during the day out of the way, but down at night and brushed well before bed. In later years I got to help her brush it out. Only at the end, when she was tired and in the wheelchair, did she allow it to be cut, and even then under protest. I think it was one of her only vanities, being a fairly plain woman. I can surely understand that and not begrudge her. But she was a lovely woman all the same, and I smile to think that Grandpa saw that too, those many years ago when he admired her carpentry handiwork upon meeting her...