Back in the mountains when
your Grandparents were young, life on the farm was hard. There was no electricity, no running water or
indoor plumbing, and no nearby grocery store.
Farms had to be self-sufficient. Farm folk raised their food, made their
clothes, repaired what was broken and made do with what they had.
Crops of cotton and corn were
grown to support the farm. Most farmers kept a few cows for milk and a mule or
two for plowing. Hogs, and chickens were
allowed to range free and forage in the woods for food. They, along with wild game provided meat for
the family. The farm wife kept a vegetable
garden and canned, or put by, fruits and vegetables to feed the family
throughout the year.
Fannie Lee had lived her whole
life on a farm. She accepted the hard
work without question and gained pleasure from little things. The flash of a
hummingbird or song of a red bird, the
satisfied hum of the chickens as they pecked about the yard, the soft fur of
the kittens rubbing against her ankles.
She would pause while sweeping off the porch to watch fluffy white
clouds drift across the blue sky. She admired the muted colors of the hens and
chicks growing in rusting pails on the front porch, the only plant she had time
to tend. She had a soft spot in her
heart for all young, growing things, for all God’s creatures.
While she could pluck a hen
and fry it up to golden, delicious crispness, she could not bring herself to
kill it. On a day she planned to have
chicken for dinner, she let Wheeler know before he headed to the fields. He was the one to capture the unfortunate
fowl, chop its head off and hang it on the clothesline. Fannie Lee took it from
there and proudly piled the crisply fried breasts and legs on her Blue Willow
platter and set it on the table.
Each fall, Wheeler would take
one or two hogs and pen them up. For the next month or two these hogs would be
fed on corn. The corn diet fattened them up quickly and made the meat tender
and tasty. The butchered hogs would provide bacon, sausage, hams, chops, ribs and
lard enough to feed the family for the coming year.
Fannie Lee knew this. She knew
they needed the meat. Still, just as she
could not bring herself to kill a chicken for Sunday dinner, she couldn’t stand
the thought that the pigs penned up down at the barn would soon be hanging in
the smokehouse.
One sleepless
night, as she wrestled with her thoughts, a plan began to form. Quietly she slipped from the bed and in her nightdress, crept
through the darkness to the barn.
The
hogs, hearing her soft footsteps, inched to the fence to eye her
suspiciously. Fannie Lee hesitated only briefly, then stepped
forward and lifted the heavy bar that secured the gate. The hogs, sensing freedom, rushed
through the opening and disappeared into the night.
Fannie Lee
smiled. She knew Wheeler would round them up again tomorrow and soon enough
they would be reduced to bacon and hams. Tonight though – tonight they were
free.
Lesson 4 - Find Your Voice
