By TERRY CUMMINS
Local columnist
> SOUTHERN INDIANA —
Life was different back in the good old days. How good was it? Well, it was nothing like it is today. We lived off the land, but now people seem to be living off the Internet. When do they eat? What do they eat? How do they eat when their hands are connected to wireless things?
Back in my younger days, my hands were connected to pitchforks, plow handles and check lines. Check lines or reins were the long leather strips used to guide the horses as they pulled the plows, mowing machines and wagons to haul the corn and hay. The front cover of my first book, “Feed My Sheep,” is a copy of an old photograph of my grandfather and me plowing our garden back in 1940. He held the plow handles as I drove the horses. Now, a mother wouldn’t let her 6-year-old son get near a horse. The only horses kids ride today are the ones on a merry-go-round.
We spent every day working to raise and store food for our animals, people in the cities and ourselves. That’s about all we did, every day. It was just as important to provide food for our animals as it was for our family and our neighbors if they had need. All summer long, we’d work to fill the barn lofts with hay, the corn crib with corn and the silo with silage for our dairy herd. Our sheep thrived on good alfalfa hay and the other animals on sweet and red clover. Honeybees made the best honey from sweet clover, and broom cane made the best sorghum. Farmers, who worked the land, knew these things, because they watched and studied the way nature worked.
It was satisfying during a cold winter day to open the barn doors at dusk and watch our animals rush in. They’d be waiting for us out in a cold rain or snow, and when we filled their mangers, it was like they said a blessing to us. The funny thing was that we took care of them before we went to the house for our supper by a warm fire and lamp light. And we always rested good at night, knowing we’d done our best that day, taking care of everything. When life all around you depends on you, there’s no other choice.
During the summers, our animals lived on lush pastures and we grew nearly everything we ate. We needed a little money for coffee, corn meal, salt, sugar and baking powder for the biscuits and that was about it. Mom spent the summer cooking to feed us, and patching our work clothes. We’d come in from a hot field for noon dinner, and she’d have the porch table loaded with the fresh pickings — green beans, golden roasting ears, mashed potatoes and gravy, sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and a platter of fried chicken from the hen house. She’d take the biscuits out just before we sat down. It was cooler on the back porch than it was in a hot hay field, or in the kitchen where she worked over her wood-burning cook stove.
The sun got hotter in the afternoon. The hay dust would choke you and stick to your skin. The kitchen got hotter, too, in the afternoon as Mom worked at the hot stove, canning and preserving all the things from the garden for winter. While we filled the lofts and cribs, she filled the dark, cool cellar under our old house. She’d cook and preserve nearly everything. The jars lined the shelves down there with the potato bin heaping full. Was there enough to get us through the winter? We hoped so.
By Thanksgiving, we’d given it our best, storing up everything we could. Then in early winter when the weather cooled down, it was hog-killing time, a time to cure meat for the winter and into the spring. The very best country-cured ham required only a mixture of course salt, pepper and dark brown sugar. My goodness, a country ham the next Easter with all the fixings was a feast fit for the celebration of the story at the cross. It was wondrous — the blessings we took from the land, and all we had to do was take the best care we could of the abundance set before us.
Back then, you couldn’t hurry. We followed our horses, which set the pace.
Contact Terry Cummins at TLCTLC@AOL.com.
