I Like It
I like this time of year. Ya, ya, I realize what comes next but for this day and the ones previously that we have had, I like it . . . I like it a lot.
With the temps and dew point as they have been it takes me back to the Boon Lake farm when Carrie and Kevin were wee ones. Oh how I cherish those memories. I would most likely be digging potatoes at this time of the year, while the kids played in the grass alongside the garden. We had a huge garden at that.
In the basement of the farmhouse was a separate closet just right for hanging carrots and onions up by the stems. We didn’t wash off the potatoes, carrots or onions as they kept better and longer. It was a tight fit as there was a crock of sauerkraut biding its time as to when we could cold pack it. A smaller crock had the rendered lard in it from the most recent hog butchering. The lard stayed cool and a small container would be brought up to the kitchen as needed.
The fruit jars on the shelf held fruit sauces of various flavors and jams and jellies. Oh I remember the backache I had gotten one year from peeling pears for sauce canning. It took me right into Hector to the chiropractor. It did give a lot of satisfaction after the fact. Elvera didn’t peel her pears . . . the core was taken out and in the jars they went. Not the style that Lena taught. The only thing that stopped the filling of the larder was when I ran out of fruit jars.
We had splurged on two Sears chest freezer that were in the same basement closet as the furnace. Orlin worked at 3M in Hutchinson and had bought one of their electric sealers. There were various sizes of the plastic bags and with little work, the bags were filled with goodies and the air within the bag was minimal. There were containers of strawberries and raspberries alongside plastic bags of peeled and sliced apples waiting to be made into apple crisp, sauce or pies. Saving the cardboard container of a pound of butter all year long was the perfect fit for a plastic bag filled to the brim with the sweetened frozen berries to stack up neatly in the freezer. When I had extra time, I would make up apple pies and freeze them, ready for the oven when one was needed.
Right alongside of the garden items in the freezers was the butchered chickens, ducks, a few turkeys and of course the packages of beef and pork in a variety of cuts.
Hmm.
It was not an easy life, but it was my life and I was meant to be a good farm wife and a good farm mother. Carrie and Kevin were always just at the end of my elbow, either pitching in or pitching a fit that one was doing what the other wanted to do. I will say that Carrie was good at cleaning the chicken gizzards among so many other gopher jobs. Both kids put on many miles fetching things for me when we were in the full thrust of the fall work of cleaning out the garden.
Hmm.
As I have said many times . . . me, myself and memories . . . it never gets old.