Thirteen

I liked winter time as there wasn’t so much little jobs to do during the day and I’d get to go along when Father took some logs to a saw mill about six miles away to have them sawed into boards and it back home. 

He’d put three fare sized logs on the bobsled which was a pretty good load for the team.  It would take most of the day and some times it would be awful cold before we got home or we had to sit right on top of the load and all the weather would hit us. 

When we stopped the team for them to rest I’d go up to their head to see the frost and ice on the long hairs all around the nose and mouth from breathing and the steam would be coming off their body where they sweat. I often wondered why they were never cold. Father said they got a lot more hair in the fall and it would keep them warm then shed a lot of it in the spring and summer.

Some days in the early part of the winter I would be thrashing some beans by hand in the barn. We would let them get ripe and dry in the garden then pull them up, put them in a pile in the barn, then as we had time we spread some out.  I had a three foot stick with a shorter one tied to one end and we’d hit the beans with it.  The dry pods would bust open then we used a fork to pick the stalks up and shake them out and all the beans went on the floor.

Mother used to soak the amount she wanted to cook overnight then put a gallon crock in the oven.  I guess it took three or four hours ‘til they were done.  We always had enough ‘til we had new ones the next fall.

Father left some of the parsnips in the ground over winter and we’d dig them up early in the spring. Most of the other vegetables Mother canned. A lot of the apples was dried and kept in pillow cases.  We used to have some pop corn we raised.  We had to plant that a ways from the sweet corn as it would be mixed on the ears if it was side by side. Father planted some sweet corn as early as he could then one month later he’d plant more that way we had sweet corn longer.

I used to pick a lot of the dandelions in the spring.  We had a lot of them for greens.  Mother used to pick some greens in the woods that we ate.  I don’t remember what they were called but they lasted about three weeks.  They were used like dandelions then toward the end they had roots on, big enough to use too.  We had a lot of rhubarb to use for pie.  Mother canned some of that too.  There was a lot of all kinds of things but it all had work to it, to pick and clean and get ready to use.  I spent a lot of hours helping to get things ready for Mother to can.

We had ice cream once in a while. We had an ice cream maker I had to turn by hand.  It made about two quarts when it was done and it sure tasted good as we didn’t have that only about two or three times a year.

Mother used to skin some of the thick cream off the milk in the milk house that was from the night before. I used to like to drink it as it was good and cold. Some times we just put cream in a two quart jar, about half full, and I’d shake it until it was butter.  The buttermilk from it sure was good.  The butter and maple sugar was good on pancakes for breakfast.  The maple sugar made the oatmeal good too.  We used a lot of that when Mother got it for a change once in a while. I used it on raspberries, blackberries and blueberries.  There was a lot of them to pick every year.