Plastic Frisbees hadn’t yet made their debut (leastways we hadn’t seen any), so Eddie and I would sail cow chips across the meadow and through the woods. Sometimes the neighbors’ old sooner dog would run and try to catch them.
Cow chips usually created a problem on our hands and clothing over a short period of time. Come Saturday nights we were forced to bathe away all our hard-earned grime to be presentable at church the following day. Way back in days of yore, Eddie never did like going to church – him having to wear his sisters’ hand-me-down Sunday shoes like he always did.
It wasn’t bad enough to be poor, so the depression had to come along and make life a little more unpleasant for all of us. As I recall, spuds and dry beans were the main offering at most meals. ‘Taters’ fried, boiled or baked were always on the menu. Fried potatoes, eggs and sausage are still my preference for a real fine breakfast.
Meat was uncertain and a rare addition back then, thus we would eat just about any critter that roamed the fields or lived in the forest. We even sampled a few that took refuge in creeks and rivers or burrowed underground.
At night if you happened to hear a long-eared hound dog baying in the distance, you knew for sure some hunter had his next meal up a tree – ‘possum, raccoon or whatever.
Since food was scarce you had to keep an eye on what grub was stashed outside your house. Smoke sheds, fruit cellars and hen houses were choice looting places. You could safely leave your house unlocked, but not a place where only food was kept. There were no shoplifters back then, just plain ole thieves and rogues.
Where we lived wasn’t exactly a Norman Rockwell community, but we loved it as if it was. Quite often friends or neighbors would drop by to sit a spell and maybe stay for the evening meal. Most guests lived no more’n a hoot and a holler away.
Hours before that meal, delicious country cookin’ had bubbled away on an old cast iron stove from late that morning till supper time. Baked goods would always be flavorful and nicely browned. Old-time baking had a special flavor and perhaps it came from the pork lard that was used or the scent from cooking on a wood-burning range.
Many times Eddie and I would supply part of the bounty for our families’ weekend meals. Rabbit, quail, squirrel and the like. Sometimes just for fun we would cook and eat small game on the spot where we found them. Birds, crayfish, frog legs – even snakes. The venom from some of those snakes was so powerful one drop was enough to kill every person living on the moon at that time.
Once I brought home two small quail for my mother to fry up for me. Her cookin’ was always ‘beddern’ mine. She said, “son, if I waste my shortening on these scrawny ‘thangs,’ you’re gonna eat them if I have to cram them down your throat.” She almost had to do just that because I soon found out I wasn’t all that hungry. I left the table with more scrawny bird in my pockets than in my stomach.
Somehow my folks never did consider quail as a good source of food. Ever try bringing down a fowl on the fly with a slingshot? Eddie did on a few occasions. I always did suspect he had kissed the Blarney stone some time or other, him being so skilled at everything he did.
The last time I saw Eddie was in a hospital. We were there visiting his sister who had just given birth to her first rugrat. As I recall, Eddie and I were upstairs where they kept all the fresh babies. He told me at the time that he was on a quest for a nice girl made of flesh and bone that didn’t have crow’s feet under her eyes. I’ve been working on a cure for crow’s feet ever since, but to no avail.
