CHAPTER VII
It was not easy to wrangle a living for seven, out of fifty-two acres of only fairly productive land. There were possibly twenty acres of better than average productive land, twelve acres above and twenty acres below average. My father received a pension of thirty dollars monthly for his civil war service which augmented the meager farm income.
After my grandfather Bradford's death, my mother inherited sixty acres, one and one half miles west of our home. This acreage made only a slight contribution to our income.
Nothing was wasted. I well remember the old ash hopper which stood east of our house in the chicken yard where we dumped the ashes from our stove and fireplace. When it rained the lye content went into solution and dripped down into an earthen crock and was used to make soap. The waste from the kitchen was boiled in the lye to accomplish saponefication, resulting in an ugly brown, foul smelling concoction which we used on Monday in the family washing.
The soiled clothes were boiled in a large copper washtub on the kitchen stove and came out clean from the hand operated washing machine. I am sure today if we had to use such slow and laborious methods we would take better care of our clothes. I am sure the name "Blue Monday" came from the laborious and unpleasant task of doing the laundry which was traditionally reserved for Monday.
One of the most precious memories I harbor is that of maple syrup time which came in February or March. We had several Maple trees in our six acre wood lot which were tapped, using home made elder spigots, under which a bucket was hung to collect the sap. The sap was gathered in a barrel on a sled, pulled by faithful old Dock and emptied in large iron kettles where it was concentrated by boiling. It was a long and tedious process and seemingly such tiny rewards in the small amount of syrup for the large amount of sap processed, but it tasted mighty good on
buckwheat cakes at breakfast time.
I remember so vividly when our entire family went to the sugar camp and cooked our supper. That evening of family pleasure provides me with one of my most precious memories in my full bank of memories.
My father was an expert gardener, and our garden unfailingly supplied an abundance of delicious vegetables for our dining table and for canning and preserving for winter needs. I remember that we were the only family in the neighborhood who attempted to grow celery, which required special attention and care during its growing, and after it was harvested. The plants required an extra amount of moisture and had to be bleached after they were harvested.
We seemed to be more successful than our neighbors in growing watermelons and cantaloupes, and always seemed to have plenty to give away. One summer I remember was an exceptionally good melon season and we had far more than we and our neighbors could eat, so we took a wagon load of beautiful melons into town hoping we might sell them to grocery stores, but there was no sale for them. We threw out the melons along the roadside during our journey home.
We stopped at a grocery store and purchased a slice of cheese, a can of sardines, five cents worth of crackers and cookies, each item costing five cents, and had a lunch fit for a king, as we bumped along the rough gravel road.
I can still see our cellar as it appeared in the fall of the year after the vegetables and fruits had been gathered, canned or preserved for the winter season. On the rear wall of the twenty foot square cellar room were bins heaped full of potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage, celery, turnips, parsnips and carrots. Along the sides of the room were sturdy shelves supporting row after row of cans containing tomatoes, sweet corn, green beans, black raspberries, cherries, peaches, strawberries, apple butter, mince meat and sundry other fruits, vegetables and meats after the
butchering season.
The building over the cellar we called the smoke house and our cured meats hung from the ceiling beams and were easily accessible to the kitchen. Certainly no better example of planned providence could be found than our cellar and smoke house provided.
The family did not enjoy many luxuries. We were plainly and inexpensively dressed and lived a generally spartan life, but we were never undernourished. With a productive garden with a wealth of vegetables, fields of wheat to produce our flour, pigs and cattle for our meat, hens to give us eggs and chicken dinners, contented cows in the barn to supply milk, orchards to give boundless supplies of apples, peaches, cherries, plums, gooseberries, raspberries and strawberries, we enjoyed luxuries as great as a king could afford.
To be continued
