Farm Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

the hot water after they killed it. A pulley was attached to the hog that kept it right at working height so they could gut it. I liked to watch the insides of the animal, I always stayed close and watched when they had it hanging by the pulley.
    When I went to high school and studied physiology, I could remember about the intestines, heart and liver and got high grades in that subject.
    We’d eat the heart and liver first. The other meat had to hang for a few days before you could eat it. Mother cut and fried the liver, and of course Uncle Ford got some to take home. She boiled the heart and sliced the meat off and we ate that with bread or crackers. We ate beef brains but not pork brains. Brains were cut, rolled in flour or bread crumbs, and fried. We never got tired of meat, we ate it three times a day.
    One chilly day in November, I saw all the cats lying next to the barn in the sunshine, their paws crossed in front of them so contentedly, watching the butchering.
    The next two days Dad and Ford cut off all the fat meat and Mother cooked lard. The skin would be put in the oven to bake for cracklings. Boiling the fat would be so dangerous. You’d boil it on the stove until it came to a certain temperature, and still boiling, it had to be strained then poured into jars.
    One time my cousin Edna Wilson got in the way when her mother was pouring lard, and it spilled on her neck and shoulders. She had terrible scars from that. I had to stay out of the way when Mother cooked lard. I’d play outside with the dogs and cats, and throw the ball up against the barn and catch it, seeing how many times out of a hundred I could catch it.
    One of my jobs was getting the cobs for the cookstove. The corn would get shelled with a shelling machine, the grain running out one side into a wagon and the cobs out the other. We had a big, wire fence woven into a circle that held the cob pile. Those cobs were really important because that’s what we burned in our cook stove.
    I’d bring in cobs to put in the cob box between the stove and the wall, and they were right there ready to be burned. We used cobs all winter, and if we wanted to hold the fire when it was real cold, we had coal in the basement coalbin. We used everything we had, didn’t waste anything.
    What we didn’t eat, we gave to the pigs and the chickens. I often gathered the eggs in a bucket and put them in the basement landing, where Mother sorted and divided them into the egg case, a box with folding cardboard dividers. One egg went in each division. You weren’t supposed to wash them because water would weaken the shells, but you could use a vinegar solution. Mother would wipe them with a cloth dampened in that solution to clean off the spots.
    She had two egg cases, one held fifteen dozen and the other had two sides and held thirty dozen. Each case had several layers with a divider between each layer, a lid over the top and handles on the sides. About once a week she took them into town to sell or trade to Schneibers or Waldo’s store in Inavale.
    Poor Mrs. Waldo was in a wheelchair with arthritis, her joints so stiff she couldn’t stand. Mrs. Waldo sat and took out the eggs, then Mother brought the empty crate home for next time. The store gave two cents more a dozen for eggs on trade, so Mother chose to trade her eggs for groceries. Her list had few variations—flour, sugar, Karo syrup, bologna, crackers, salt, coffee, baking powder, vanilla, Nestle’s drink mix. If I had money I’d buy candy, but she never bought it.
    Norma Lambrecht’s mother had even more chickens than us, and Mrs. Lambrecht traded her eggs for good things to put in Norma’s school lunches. Things like bought bread, chocolate cookies and bananas.
    Mother never did that, saying, “It’s not worth it, I can make bread and cookies for less than that.”
    Once in awhile Dad went to the Amboy mill east of Red Cloud. There was a stream of water where the mill was built, a little dam where the water