Hogs and Chickens

 While talking to my Aunt Sister the other day, I realized there were a lot of differences in the "olden" days, and yet, a lot was the same...just the ways of accomplishing things had changed. Juanita Blanche Head Merritt, my daddy's last living sibling, was born in 1921, in Tyler, Texas. The Head family had moved to Waco in 1914, when Papa Head went to work for the City of Waco at Cameron Park.  Mama Head had returned to Tyler and her family for the birth of Juanita. Sister was about six months old when she and Mama Head moved toWaco.

 The Head children born after her, Alma Louise (Toots) and Durward Allen (Son), were born in Waco.  All but Uncle Perry of the Head family had nicknames....James Odia (Uncle Odie to me) was "Bones", David Rankin ("Uncle Red " to me), and my daddy, Ralston Cecil ("Goober"). Aunt Sister got her nickname  by being the first sister after four brothers. The Heads had another boy, Durward Allen, known as "Uncle Son" to me, as well as another girl, Alma Louise, known to me as "Aunt Toots". These aunts and uncles were the parents of all my beloved cousins on my daddy's side.

Sister and I were talking about what people ate when she was a child, eighty-plus years ago. She said they ate about what we eat today, but the way the food was obtained was very different. She meant the old way of getting a  live animal to the dining table was very different from today.

 I agree. As a young child in the early 1950's, I remember being terrified by hearing a big old hog squealing as it was killed, and then seeing it hanging in the big oak tree in the front yard of Mama Head and Papa Head's old house next door to my house. My uncles and Daddy scraped it with sharp butcher knives, dipped it up and down in boiling hot water in a  big, black iron kettle over a wood fire to remove the " hair", and then cut it up. . I did not immediately link that event with the wonderful ham, bacon, pork chops, and sausage my mother prepared as delicious meals for us. I remember my parents making homemade sausage as late as the sixties.

 Sister told me that, years ago, they bought very little at the store....most folks grew their own vegetables in their own garden and raised their own meat....chickens, calves, and hogs. They also butchered and dressed their meat themselves. As a child in the late forties and fifties, I detested the process involved in getting a chicken dinner on the table. I will never forget Daddy wringing the chicken's neck, and then it flopping all over the yard, blood going everywhere. Once dead, it was plunged into a big pot of boiling water over a  wood fire, where the smell of the hot feathers truly turned one's stomach. I can recall that smell, even today, over fifty years ago.

Guineas and turkeys were also killed by the same process. Sometimes Daddy chopped off their heads with a small ax. Either way was very distressing for us kids. Of course, that was the only way to get a fried chicken dinner if you raised the chickens for that purpose! I remember the very first time my mother bought an already-killed chicken to cook.... I was so glad we did not have to kill it ourselves.

 Very few people today even know how to cut up a whole chicken. We really do take so much for granted when we walk in today's grocery store , with all that already processed, wonderful food! And the quantity of food! Not just the quality! Now if we could only just not eat so much of this plentiful bounty. My sister, Sue, says we would not eat as much as we do,  if we first had to raise it, catch it, kill it, clean it, and, finally, cook it!!