Posts Tagged ‘Childhood memories’
As a child, my mother would always shoo me out of the house with an emphatic, “Go Play!” Most of the time I would begrudgingly stomp out and slam the screen door along the way (still love that sound). At the time, I just wanted to stay inside and bother her or play in my room, but on those nice spring, summer, fall, winter days (It’s Texas folks. It’s always outside weather.) she wanted me out of her hair. My mother was a busy woman after all. She was a housewife raising two kids on a farm in the middle of BFE (errrr…West Texas). What the heck was there for us kids to do?
One of my fondest memories was the family garden. It was a living buffet of goodness. I can remember sitting in the onion patch eating seed onions and gorging on sun warmed cherry tomatoes. Oh, It’s a fond memory now but at the time it was also a sore spot. After supper every evening it was our job to go pick, weed, hoe, shell peas or laboriously do whatever needed to be done. This was no piddly back yard garden either. It was a serious, get you through the rest of the year with no grocery shopping kind of garden. An acre, at least, of row after row of organic, home grown goodness. I was the older of the two children and still maintain that I did ALL of the work while my brother made mud holes to “waller” in. Now I realize that my mother had the hardest job of all. Many nights she spent exhaustively canning and freezing and blanching and sterilizing and juicing and peeling and water bathing the fruits of our labor into the wee hours. After having done thins myself, I know realize what an arduous task this was. Speaking of fruit trees, there wasn’t a shortage of them either. I mostly remember peaches, plumbs, apricots, and pecan.
Ahhh the good life. We grew, fed or hunted most everything we ate. There was always a cow grazing in the field named T-bone or a pig named Porkchop. My dad hunted deer, and dove and is still to this day an avid, to the obsessive degree, fisherman. The amount of pictures I have sitting on a dead deer carcass will frighten you. I will spare you the scanned visuals, so you will just have to believe me. (No wonder I am a vegetarian!)
When I was very young, my family only ate out at a restaurant once a year. A real treat was to go to McDonalds for an ice cream only (small) and play on the play ground for an hour. These special occasions were reserved for when we got to go to town for well-doctor visits or buying shoes. Which was about once a year as well. We were dirt poor yet we lived and ate better than most families do today. These were happy and good times for me.
The story of my childhood is what I consider beautiful basics. I know that times have changed and I am essentially a city girl now, but I still want to hold on to these principles. I want my children to know where their food and livelihood comes from. simple. beautiful. and basic.
In my next post, I will fast forward a few years and discover Taco Bell!
Simon
Wenders