Growing Up Country

I have come to realize that I am the epitome of the saying "You can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl." And the truth is - I like being a country girl. I copied and pasted the recent facebook post about being from the south but I think there is a distinction between a southern belle and a country girl from the south. Country girls get dirty, southern belles try not to. I love being outside, be it working in the garden, flower beds or hiking. This involves getting dirty, so I must fall into the country girl category.

There's also some confusion about country people and hill people. I think hill people are those that lived a subsistence life. They owned a little spot of land and hunted to provide meat and maybe grew a little garden. Country folks, by my definition, owned several acres, farmed the land, raised cattle, hogs, chickens, maybe ran a dairy farm and raised crops, as well as a big garden.

I grew up on a working farm (heavy on the working). My Daddy milked cows when I was little but government restrictions tightened up and he later got out of the dairy business and raised beef cattle. We also raised hogs and chickens, grew hay and made a garden, picked blackberries, huckleberries, canned and preserved any fruits and vegetables that we could. One of my memories is the day that the baby chicks would arrive on the "mail car." They would come in a box and I couldn't wait to pet them. I thought they were so cute. We would take them out to the chicken pen and put food and water in old tires cut in half. Sure enough some would fall in the water and drown. Later when they got bigger, they became "fryers." So much for the cute little chicks. We always had hogs and it seemed like an old sow would wait until the coldest day of winter to have her pigs. Daddy and Mom would have to go to the hog pen and check on things all night. Sometimes one would be frozen and Judith thought it was great fun to wrap the pig in a blanket and rock it. We learned the facts of life living on the farm. You can't hide that stuff. We knew how calves and pigs came about. We helped in the garden, picking up rocks, pulling weeds, picking off bugs - whatever needed to be done.

Our Granny churned butter in a jar. She would rock it back and forth until it made butter. Judith and I tried our luck at it but I'm not sure we ever made butter. When it was done we would spread it on a biscuit and sprinkle it with sugar. We thought it was good eatin'. We also learned to cook at a pretty early age just by helping out in the kitchen. We didn't know anything about cooking "fancy" food but we could put a country meal on the table.

If you grew up country you know about wilted lettuce, radishes, and onions. You would melt bacon grease and pour it over the salad. I miss that sometimes. I always thought you should have pinto beans with wilted lettuce, and of course cornbread (without sugar). The older folks ate milk with cornbread crumbled up in it. I never really like that.

Mom and Granny sewed our clothes. We would go to "Zula's" and get patterns and material and they would make most of our clothes. Mom ordered us shoes and underwear from Aldens, Sears, and Montgomery Wards. There weren't any trips to the mall back then. We had pageant dresses and prom dresses and even our wedding dresses handstitched from home. Our Granny had an old treadle machine and Mom had an electric one. There wasn't a week that went by that one or both those machines weren't busy making something.

Looking back it seems that being country was a hard life but never once did I go to bed hungry. We had lots of food and I never worried that we wouldn't have food. I always had lots of clothes, a warm coat and shoes, pajamas, and warm quilts on my bed.

I remember at about junior high age thinking we were poor because we lived in the country on a farm. My friends and family who lived in town seemed to me to have a much better life - they even had dishwashers and I was so envious of that. I got my eyes opened real wide though, on a school trip. I won't tell the story here but suffice it to say, when I got home from that trip, I realized that we weren't poor at all. My parents just chose to live a country life and raise country kids.

I'm thankful that I know how to cook, can, preserve, raise a garden and sew (not very well). I know that if desperate times called for it, I could make do with whatever I have and survive. I'm not sure that most folks could do that. JC was also raised country. We live modest life that's within our means. We draw pleasure from the simple things that life has to offer.