I’ve talked often about living off the land as a child. Gleaning popcorn in the fields, after the combines had harvested the fields, dragging burlap sacks over the wet ground, and filling them with ears of corn left behind. Laying them out to dry, and spending evenings shelling them to store in gallon size pickle jars for the winter months. It sounds so “Little House on the Prairie” to write about, but that’s what we did.
One of my favorite things to do was to visit a pecan grove, not far from home. The owner would bump the trees with a blade on a tractor, the nuts would fall to the ground, and we would fill coal buckets, weigh them, pay for them and take them home to crack and pick out the nuts for Christmas baking. To this day, there is nothing I like more than fresh pecans, well except for those hickory nuts I’ve talked about. The same hickory nuts that my friend Mary sent me last year, and that I hoarded in the freezer, eating a few at a time instead of sharing them with the family because they don’t have hickory nut memories like I do, and besides, I was an only child and we all know that I tend to be selfish about certain things. *grin*
We would also visit the apple orchard, where the big wooden ladders were sitting by the trees, mother would climb the ladder and fill a bucket with apples, then pass it down to me to put in a bushel basket. She loved McIntosh apples, and thought they made the best pies, I always loved Golden Delicious, and they were as big as softballs in a little girl’s eyes.
We also cooked pumpkin to can in Ball fruit jars. Not the jack o’lantern pumpkins you buy at the store, those aren’t good, you have to have pie pumpkins, bursting with flavor. They’re the ones that make the good pies.
And I can’t forget the sweet potatoes. We would dig them before the first frost in the garden, dry them on newspapers in the smokehouse, then wash them, and store them under the beds in cardboard boxes. I’ve always adored sweet potatoes and the way mother would bake one of each, one irish potato, one sweet potato, and we would cut them in half and share them at dinnertime. We still buy bushels of sweet potatoes, the best deals to be had these days are at Wal-Mart the week of Thanksgiving. They sell them for about 25 cents a pound, or at least they have for the last few years, and if you ask, they will sell them to you by the box.
We all have our childhood memories, everyone’s are unique, I’m just fortunate enough, through my blog, to share mine with you. Share some of your memories with your family this weekend, once again, it’s these simple things that they will remember about you and treasure for years to come….
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