Chicken feet? Of course. Right up there with Carp!

I was talking to a friend the other day and explaining to him the facts of survival back in the "good old days." I am pretty sure he thought I was making it up about the carp and all.  He told me that Carp was a trash fish and no one really ate them.  Hmm.  Seems like I recall wading in the river with a big seine and filling tubs with them   Mother had a way to can them so the bones got soft and they were almost like Salmon.  I said "almost".  They looked like Salmon, but they sure did not taste like Salmon.  We liked the Carp best drenched in corn meal and fried in lard.  And we always had bread when we had fish because one of the little kids would always swallow a bone and the only way to get it on down was to eat a piece of bread.  I am amazed today that none of us ever had a perforated intestine, but we didn't.

So few people are around today that actually lived through the times back then in the small town of Nickerson when it was catch as catch can and anything that didn't move real fast was going to be eaten.
Try to imagine 8 of us living in a 2 bedroom house and no income.  The house payment was $10 a month and it came first.  Mother always planted a big garden that consisted mostly of sweet potatoes, onions, beans  turnips, and corn.  The corn was not the sweet corn like we enjoy around here in the summer, but was dried and then ground into corn meal.  The root vegetables were pulled up and stored in the root cellar.  Apples were abundant and several bushels of those ended up in the root cellar.  We ate apple sauce, fried apples, baked apples, and boiled apples.

Mother always seemed to have chickens around and chickens meant eggs, except when "brooding" season was upon us.  That was when the old hens sat and hatched out babies.  Not all of them sat and we still gathered eggs, but I always kept a damn close eye on those beady eyed hens.  They were just as apt as not to fly off that nest and peck me if I got to close.  They never actually did that, but I lived in mortal terror that one day one might.

Usually the hens kept us with plenty eggs, so there were cakes when we had sugar.  If one of the neighbors butchered a hog and dad helped we had pork and we got the fat which was cooked in a cast iron pot and this gave us "cracklings" and lard.  I think out here they are called chiccarones.

Meat was never very plentiful at our house through the week, but come Sunday, we always had meat of some kind .  My favorite was fried chicken because then there would be potatoes and the good country gravy.  Now to the feet part.  Mother had to make a chicken stretch to feed 7 of us, so every bit of the chicken as going into that skillet.  Not the head though.  The feet were immersed in boiling water and skinned.  They went right into the skillet and while there was no meat on the feet they were good for chewing on and the little kids never knew they were not really getting anything to eat.

Sometimes mom would come up with a roast beef.  That was something to die for.  I especially liked the gristle.  I could chew that for the longest time and actually thought it was good.  Amazing how that worked!  Today I only eat chicken breast.  If I cook a roast it better not have any gristle in it.

So to this day I do not eat apples in any cooked form.  I do not like to smell them cooking and so I do not cook them.  I eat them raw and only when they are nice and crisp.  Needless to say, I have given up the Carp for Alaskan wild caught Salmon and the only fowl on the farm here is the geese and they are not going to be eaten.  I steal their eggs and make them into noodles.  That is my idea of birth control!  Chicken breasts is the only part of the chicken I buy or cook.  No feet for me!

I look back on the hardest times and I can not help but realize that my mother had to be the strongest woman in the world.  She took nothing and raised us kids to be functioning members of society.  She took in laundry and cleaned houses to put food on the table and clothes on our backs.  She made me a teal corduroy coat when I was in fourth grade and Lord only knows where she came up with the fabric.  I wore that coat longer than I should have because the kids finally began to tease me, but it was mine and I loved it.  When I hear Dolly Parton sing "Coat of Many Colors"  I always think of my mother.  As I get older I realize everything makes me think of my mother.  The missing her is as bad all these years later as it was the day she passed.  I do not think one ever "gets over" the death of our loved ones, we just learn to live without them and I am now acutely aware that my kids are probably walking in my shoes.

It is called life.

Well, hello new neighbors! Looks like fun ahead!

And so with everything we owned on a hay rack and kids on top holding it down and  the old milk cow tied behind, we embarked on a new life clear across town.  Things would change here.  I was probably in the second grade by this time.  Josephine was 13, Jake 9, so I must have been 7 years old.  Mother was now cleaning houses and dad was still farming.  Josephine was in charge of us since she was the oldest.  Her job was to keep us alive, not bleeding and to clean the house.  I am here to tell you, that girl took this seriously all except the part about keeping us uninjured.  She damn near beat us to death!  And who do you think did all that house work?  Not miss "just figured out there were boys and she was a girl"!  We were banished from the house as soon as our work was done and not allowed back in to "dirty the place up" and besides one of her boyfriends was usually there and they were "baking cookies".  Eating the cookies too as near as I could tell, because we never got any.

The floors of the house were wood planks about 5-6 inches wide.  Not like the wood floors in the rich peoples houses that mother cleaned.  These had to be swept every day and everything in the house had to be wiped down with an oiled rag since the dust blew in every day as a matter of course.  Dishes were washed by heating water in a pan and rinsed in cold water.  The pump house was out the back door and Jake and I were in charge of keeping the stock tank full of water.

But we had better things to do than hang out at home.  Mr. and Mrs. Rumble lived up the road a ways and they sat on thier porch most days in the summer.  Mr. Rumble told me he would give me a whole dime if I would learn the words to "Buttons and Bows" and sing it to them.  I worked very hard, but never quite got it done.  They were wonderful people.

Across the road from us lived the Barthold sisters.  They were spinsters and school teachers.  I never actually spoke with them.  I did like to hide in thier forest and spy on them when they were out in the yard.  Once I even seen them setting in the chairs drinking tea.  And strain my ears as I might I could not hear a word they said.  So I made up lots of conversations.  I do not remember what they were, but I am sure they were wild!

Sometimes Josephine left us unattended and that is when we got our chance at the telephone.  Ah, it was beautiful!  It hung on the wall and  had a speaker that you spoke into and an earpiece on the side that was held to your ear so you could hear the other person.  We were on party lines back then.  This meant several families were all on one circuit.  Say you called Joe Blow.  It would ring his signal which was maybe 2 shorts and a long.  Ours might have been 2 longs and a short.  The point was, you did not pick up someone else's call.  And if you wanted to place a call and picked up the phone and heard a conversation you said "Excuse me, please." and quietly replaced the receiver.  That is unless you were 9 and 7 years old and bored out of your mind.  Then you could do a couple things.  One was to cover the mouth piece and listen in n the conversation.  Or you could act like you did not know they were talking and crank the handle that called the operator.  This would cause a very loud ring in thier ears.  And you could titter and then act like you weren't there.  Ah, but technology caught these damn Bartholomew kids every time.  Then there was trouble.  First Josphine whipped us with a strap for "making it look like"  she was not doing her job of keeping us in line.  Then Mother would follow up with a licking for not listening to Josephine and upsetting the neighbors and now maybe they were going to take our phone out and what would we do when no one could call her to come to work?  Not to worry about dad giving us the punishment because I am not sure he ever knew we were there.

I do not know when dad worked, but a pile of hay appeared in the corner of the yard.  Not the back yard where the cows and horses were, but in the front yard so anyone driving past would know we had hay.  Go figure.  But this gave us a hiding place when we hid and threw rocks at cars going past and "kicking up dust"   which in turn made our work harder.  Damn people from town anyway!  By the way, back then, cars were either black or a dung looking green.  That is how I recall it anyway.  Not sure what color came next.  Think it was white.

After the Rumble house and on the way to town was Bull Creek.  Most of the time it was just a creek bed, but in the Spring, Nickerson and that whole area was prone to flooding and that little creek could  do some damage.  See, the Arkansas is on one side of town and Cow Creek cuts through and intesects with Bull Creek.  When Spring rains come they all get out of thier banks and Nickerson is surrounded by water and travel is not happening.  Or at least that is how it was back then.  But when the water subsided and there was just a small bit of water running through Jake and I could go seine and catch crawdads.  We would get a few inches in the bottom of the wash boiler and then we cleaned them.  This was accomplished by ripping the tail off, pulling the shell off and then dropping them in hot grease and frying them.  A feast for a king.  Or it was back then  Do you know what a crawdad is?  It is like a lobster, but about 4 inches long and it lives in the mud.  I bought some at  Walmarts several years back and they were horrible!

Bull frogs also lived in Bull Creek.  Not for long though because Jake and I got the idea that we would catch them and we would take them home and grow them until they were big and then we could have frog legs.  Josephine did not appreciate our vision at all.  Especially when I showed up with one in my dress tail and opened it to show her.  Damn frog made a leap right at her and then proceeded to try to hide from her.  She stood over me with a broom and every time I missed the frog she smacked me.  The frog was fast, but with a lot of prodding from Josephine, I was faster and our dream crumbled there in that little unpainted house there by Bull creek when she beat it to death in the dust by the door with a shovel.

When I come back next time I will tell you about the cyclone that finished our stay at the Ailmore place.

cooking and cleaning can wait for the morrow, for babies grow up, we learn to our sorrow

And that is what I woke up with, stuck in my head, this morning!  I did the online search and nothing turned up.  Does anyone else remember this poem?  Oh, crap!  I am the oldest one here and this is all I remember, so what are the odds that you can tell me the name of this?  Probably two; slim and none.  I can remember cross stitching this, but that is about as far as the memory goes.  I think I probably did it when Debbie was a wee one, but it could have been last week.  No, not last weeks since the fingers no longer curl around those teensy, tinesy needles which would make no difference since I can't see to thread the damn needle anyway!

Life certainly does throw us a hardball towards the end of the whole mess, doesn't it?  When we finally get our crap together and know what we want out of life and have a pretty good idea of how to get it, we are too late and the need to do the "bucket list" thing takes over.  While my mind is remembering winning dance contests at the sock hops back in high school, my reality is searching for something to loosen my joints up enough so I can tie my shoes!  While my mind is grooving to Gene Vincent, Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, my reality is singing "Shall we gather at the river?"

I am becoming better at checking expiration dates because I do so want to outlive the gallon of milk in the refrigerator.  Back in the mind, we called them "ice boxes" because that is what they were.  They did not get plugged into a socket some where.  We had a card that had 25 on the top and 10 on the bottom.  It was designed so that if we wanted 25 pounds of ice Mother placed it in the window which reflected the 25 right side up and the 10 would be upside down.  The ice man pulled up on the chosen day, looked at the sign, got his ice picker upper (which I have of course forgotten the correct name for [TONGS!!!!! I remembered when I reread this!]) and picked up the block of ice and brought it into the house, through the door which was never locked, and put it in the ice box, picked up his money from the top of the ice box, and went back out the door which did not lock behind him, and left.

The reason the door was not locked was because if some poor soul was in need of a drink of water, or shelter from the rain, or cold out of the heat, or was very tired and needed to rest they could  get in  the house.  If they could find something to eat, they were welcome to it.  See, back in those days, people trusted each other and crime was almost non-existent.  Horses were protected more that personal property.  And guess what happened if you stole a horse?  The towns folk would catch you and hang you, or so I heard.  Never really saw it happen.  Horse thieves were the most horrible kind of despot!  Wonder what my grandma would think about what goes on today?

The fact that the pump was out on the porch gave them access to a drink of water.  There was also a pump at the stock tank, so they really did not need to go in the house for water, but it was being hospitable, and that is what we did back then.

Bet you are wondering why I never said "use the facilities"  aren't you?  Well there were none in the house.  They were "out back."  Stands to reason that if we had no running water, we had no use for a toilet that flushed.  The school and the people in town had them and they were really nice.
 
Try to remember that we were the poor people outside of town, growing up.  I preferred to think of us as just like every one else, dirt poor.   I learned later that I was "white trash", but no one ever called me that.  It was after all, just a term they used.  I often wondered at the term and I am sure it was racist.  That was another thing;  Nickerson, Kansas, to my recollection, never had anyone except very white people.  Oh, there was the family that lived in the boxcar up on the curve, but they were Indians.  I loved to go to thier house.  The mother was very clean and even swept the dirt in front of the door.  Since we had a step and 2 feet of sidewalk, we were considered rich.

But I have once more digressed from my purpose.  If you remember this poem share this post on facebook and I will see it.  Or contact me over there on the left.  I will probably not remember what I asked, but that, friends, is how it goes in my world!

People who forget the past tend to repeat it.  ;)