Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill

Author:Louise McNeill
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780822979777
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

In the late fall came corn-cutting and corn-husking, with fodder shocks and mounds of yellow corn ears lying in the fields. G.D.'s and Uncle Dock's hands would be bleeding and raw from the harsh corn blades, but the golden corn would become hot corn pone and hominy, mush, chicken feed, hog fattener, and always a little left over for the cows. We even used corn grains for checkers, for we could always find a few red ears for our red and gold checker “men.”

All fall the men were busy cutting and hauling in the winter's wood, bringing the sheep and cattle in from the hills, doing the fall plow work, and selling the lambs and calves. They hunted squirrel and pheasant up in the woodland, and there would be fried squirrel on the table for breakfast or an occasional grouse or a few quail. In the prosperous years, there would be Mama's prized flock of turkeys to butcher, scald, pick, and pack down in barrels to send off to the Thanksgiving market in exchange for the one big stock of cash money Mama could earn during the year.

At the very end of the fall, often on Thanksgiving Day itself, came the hog butchering, with its shooting, squealing, scalding, and scraping, and with its great piles of steaming hog guts, pink mounds of sausage, grinning hogs' heads, and pans of fresh spareribs and backbone. On butchering day, we children would always retrieve, clean and dry the hog bladders, and blow them up like blood-veined balloons. We called them “footballs” and took them to school to play with. All the kids in school had their own new hog bladder footballs, and we played games of English soccer on the stony, barren school ground.

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