Page 14 - Been There… Done That!

Gary Graham
the summer so we could have enough vegetables and fruits to get through the winter. When you’re that poor, you do everything you can to put food on the table.
I can still picture killing hogs and butchering beef. In those days we would do that collectively with the neighbors because the meat would not keep without modern refrigeration. We put the pork in a smokehouse and hung the quarters up so they would last forever and we would have cured hams. We made everything we could from the milk we had. I recall letting a bucket of milk sit so the cream would rise to the top. Then it would be put it into a churn or even a jar and we would shake it and what stuck together would be butter. What would separate was buttermilk and of course, we still had the whole milk left in the bucket.
To get fresh water we used a well. In ours was a cylinder about three feet long that had a trip lever. We lowered that down into the well and let it fill with water. When it was full, we pulled it back up with a pulley and held it over the bucket and tripped the lever, allowing the water to pour into the bucket. It took about two rounds to fill the bucket, but the water was pure, or at least I guess it was. One of the most significant differences between then and now is that we bought a few things from a store. My grandmother went only twice a month at most to the local grocery store. What she purchased consisted of staples such as sacks of flour. Later she used those same sacks to make dresses because we learned to use everything and not waste anything.
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