Backyard grocery shopping

Hi neighbors. With August moving right along, we still have a couple of summer weekends before school activities take over our weekends and evenings. I hope we can all get out and see the great outdoors.

A friend and I were talking about typical Saturdays of our childhoods. We both had grandparents or parents who took their hen eggs to market on Saturday. I remember my grandmother talking about her “egg money” as her basic funds to buy groceries.

Usually her groceries were staples that people needed to cook food they already had: salt, sugar, coffee, flour, cornmeal, cocoa and occasionally oatmeal.

Other cooking needs were grown at home: lettuce, radishes, onions, carrots, peas, potatoes, sweet potatoes, melons, squash, tomatoes, turnips, rhubarb, cabbages, green beans, strawberries, wild greens, berries, grapes and pawpaws and persimmons grew wild and were collected as they became ripe.

Other goodies were several varieties of nuts. The orchard of Jonathan apples grew plenty of fruit for pies, butters, fresh fruit and also to trade with neighbors who had either plum, pear, peach or cherry trees to exchange for apples.

With the fall also came butchering time. Young hogs were old enough to furnish not only fresh meat, but also hams, bacon, salted and canned pork of all cuts. Also their fat was rendered down to make lard, and soap for washing people, dishes, clothes and cleaning harnesses.

Spring calves were separated from the herd for either selling at the market or butchering. With freezing weather just around the corner, herds and flocks were trimmed down to have fewer animals to feed over the long winter.

Hay had to be cut, dried and stored. Other crops had to be harvested and either sold or stored for winter use.

On the rare days when there was a moment to breath without bending your back; we went fishing. Fish could be salted or canned. In winter they could be frozen for a while.

When there were lots of days in those winters when the farm pond froze over. Ice was cut and packed in sawdust for keeping food through the winter and even into the late spring depending on how thick your sawdust was and how well made your ice house was. People cut ice for sale in town as well and I remember the old icehouse in town.

People don’t know how well we have it with refrigerators, freezers, gas and electric cooking stoves, air conditioners and central heat.

How many can remember having only wood stoves for heat? If you stayed close enough to the stove (no more than five feet away from it) you could stay warm. You had to keep turning around now and then to warm the side away from the stove!

The old gas stoves were better, but only because they had fans. The fans would move the warm air out away from the stove and you could sit ten feet away and still be pretty warm.

With central heat the entire house was warmed from a furnace (either coal, wood, or some type of gas/oil) and the heat was forced throughout the house via ducts and vents.

I remember my grandmother was happy to get a two burner electric hot plate for cooking in the summer. She no longer had to burn wood in the wood cook stove to make her meals! Of course, by the time she got it, she lived alone and didn’t make the huge meals she was used to cooking when her family all lived at home.

So when you turn off the air conditioning on those rare cool days this fall, don’t complain of the heat. Be grateful you don’t have to suffer through the heat of a wood cook stove to make your meals.

And when it starts to feel a little too cool in September, don’t complain and don’t turn on the central heat. Put on a sweater and some sweat pants and wrap up in a blanket to watch TV with the family in the evenings.

Just because we have things pretty good right now, doesn’t mean it will always be so; and it certainly doesn’t give us the right to abuse the resources we have so readily at hand.

Thinking about the past and the hardships people faced trying to survive isn’t just nostalgia — it’s a reminder of how things could be again.