Page 22 - 1st Anthology 2011

We had lots of vegetables in our cellar of our house. It was a dugout underneath the
house. We had different areas for different things. Like for carrots my dad would bring

sand. We would dump it in the corner, with the walls around it. We would plant our
carrots in there, and it never spoils. We had fresh carrots all winter.

The turnips, we had to scrap them off. We would only have the peelings because if you
don’t do that, they’ll get rotten. Onions you just put it in the dirt just like the potatoes. I
think that’s the only vegetables we had. My mom would pickle the beets.

She would pickle eggs all the time because when I was growing up I liked pickled eggs.

Today I don’t even want to look at eggs because my daughter cooked me rotten eggs for
breakfast. I don’t even want to think about it. Anyway, she pickled eggs and she gave a lot
away to the old people. You know some of them walk just to get to my mom and dad’s
place for vegetables. Most of the old people liked our turnips, carrots and potatoes. They
didn’t bother with the other ones. They used to cook potatoes outside in the fire. They
put them in hot ashes. Maybe that is where our baked potatoes came from. Even cooking
bread in the fire, which came from aboriginal people.

They had to work with nature, and what nature produces they survived on. Like wild
meat, today we can’t even find a rabbit. My grandson killed a wild rabbit up west on the
reserve. He brought it to me, and when I was cleaning it to cook it, there was something
wrong with it between the meat and the skin. It looked like some kind of bubbles. So I
just gave it to my dog. She ate it and she survived. I don’t know if I would have survived if
I ate it.

In the springtime I had to help my dad plow the garden because he was getting old. I had

to help plant the seeds in and plant the carrots and potatoes and all those things. In the
mean time I still had all my other chores to do, chickens and geese I had to take care of.
This one time I lost one mother goose, and I watched her to see where she was going. She
disappears for days. I followed her quietly and here she had a nest behind the hill, and it
was covered in the tall grass. That’s how I found them, and there was a bunch of baby
geese.

I have all kinds of forks and spades lying around. This one time a cow chased us, and we

were going under the corral underneath the fence. I was behind my mom and she was
dragging that fork. I kneeled right down on that sharp fork. I didn’t say anything there,
but after we got through I showed her my leg. There are still scars on my leg. Another
time I was chopping small wood to cook with, for morning. We had to have small wood. I
was chopping into the wood, and I missed it and cut my leg. Now I have a big white scar.

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