Southern Comfort

COUNTRY LIVING

As a child, growing up on the farms in the country was a normal lifestyle for me.  In those days we didn’t have all of life’s essentials as we do today.  Therefore, I experienced a lot and learned a great deal about survival and making do with what you had.  The living conditions were so different back then, compared to today.  We had no electric, gas, indoor pluming, telephones or television until years later.  We used kerosene lamps and lanterns at night to see, and cast iron wood-burning stoves for cooking.  Our pot-bellied heaters gave us good heat, once you got a fire burning.  We used wood called Lywood that came from a pine tree.  When you put it in with the other wood, the fire burned for a long time.  Today if we get hot we can turn on a fan or an air conditioner and cool off.  Back then, you had to sit outside on the porch and pray that a cool breeze would blow by and cool you off.

Living in the country, on different farms, was great.  The open country sides, the fields of crops and the houses that were so far apart, that you had to walk a half mile to visit your neighbors.  Most of the neighbors were family, because we all lived and worked on the same lands.  Sundays after church, was visiting time.  The families gathered together and talked, mostly about the field work.  The men planned ahead, of how some of those fields could be finished within a few days, compared to the others.  My parents served cake and home-made ice cream to the guests.  When they came, we were always respectable and polite.  That’s one lesson that our parents instilled in us from a very young age, to respect others and be especially kind to the elderly.  We weren’t allowed to run or play around the visitors, we were taught that a child should be seen and not heard.

We had a very large garden that my dad cared for.  There were cabbages, string beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, peas, corn, okra, watermelon, collards, mustard greens and squash.  Any veggies we wanted were right there in the garden.  Dad built a small shed that was called “the smoke house”.  That’s where all the smoked meats were kept after hog killings.  The chicken coups were in the backyard beside the barn and the pigpens were far back in the back of the barn.

The livestock was kept away from out playing area.  Dad put up a wire fence for our protection.  We had lots of chickens and a few roosters that roamed the yard.  There was this one rooster that thought he owned the place.  He crowed every morning at six o’clock, as if he was a time clock.  He would wake everyone up.  Then the neighbor’s roosters would follow suit.  There was a lot of crowing going on every morning.  He would attack you if you got to close to him.  He always tried to attack my grandmother whenever she visited.  He had spurs on the back of his feet that looked like claws and they were sharp, I know this because one day he attacked me.

Our outhouse, “toilet” was a shed set in the backyard on the opposite side of the barn.  If you had to go at night, you needed to carry a kerosene lamp or a flashlight to see where you walked.  We desperately tried not to go at night.  The outhouse was a shed with a door for privacy.  The inside had a wooden bench that was attached from wall to wall with two holes cut into the seat where you sat down to urinate and defecate down onto the ground.  One day I really had to go, I was in a hurry.  I thought I locked the door.  As I was removing my clothes to sit down, the door blew open and that old “bastard” rooster jumped in on me.  He pecked and clawed at me like he was crazy.  I was screaming and yelling for help.  Someone came and got him off of me.  When I finally came out I was scratched, bloody and my clothes were torn, and my mother was beating the hell out of that rooster with the broom.  Today I still have scars on my hips and thighs.  He also tore hair from the top of my head, and to this day I have trouble growing hair in that spot.  He really got me good.  The moral of this story is, “all doors aren’t locked.”

He continued to roam the yard until one Sunday morning when my maternal grandmother came to visit.  As she was walking into the yard, he attacked her.  We got him off of her.  She had only a few scratches, but the following Monday his “goose was cooked”, he was our dinner.  I refused to eat any of him because I hated that bird.  I had a good meal that night, without any meat.