Pull up a stump, plenty of room around our fire! Oral history from the great depression.
Yeah, this H is a story about the great Opression about 100 years past. Name a baby. Oh yes, we lived on a farm near Somerside Prince Edward Island and a Green Gables. That's all people knew about the island.
in those days we were cut off. you could see Nova Scotia across the Straet the north Umberland Straet. but it it was as if somebody had just painted it on a giant canvas and hung it there. Nobody I knew went there we had this Pony baby Shetland Ponies were wonderful for children and baby had been my brothers and then my two sisters rode her and then she came to me.
My father lost his jab at the farm where the owners raised racing horses. the Trotters and Pacers they used to sell all through the United States Not many people wanted a good Trotter in those days and he had to try and make a living on our little place. And you see, my Farmer owned this small farm and he just didn't know farming potato farming or any other kind. All he knew was horses in the depths of the dark depression.
One winter we practically lived on potatoes. In the spring they were sprouting and the Sprouts became our vegetables like bean sprouts. We ate potatoes mashed, boiled, mashed and boiled I don't remember much meat and I guess we weren't on relief. An island Scotsman is a pretty Proud Bird the summer next M Mother sent me for a week with my auntie, her sister in Charlot town and I stayed the week and when I went home on The Old Tunerville Trolley train they had in those days.
My father met me at the station on the way home. He told me the baby had died. she'd got the bloat, they swell up horribly and you have to puncture their stomach to get the gas out. They hadn't found her until it was too late.
She'd been picked up by a truck from the Fox Farm down the road. I cried naturally I would cry but on a farm animals die and I didn't feel that bad I lost a dear friend. Oh yes, but that's the way it was I was about 12 years old and I understood these things Now the following summer I went to the beach because my father had got his job back at the track and my mother had sold a lot of hooked drugs to tourists so they could send me to the beach to visit with my cousins one cousin one day. Marion a vicious little snit.
She asked me how my dear horse baby had tasted. Of course she didn't come right out with it, but her brother said their father, my uncle had come over from Kings County to our farm while I was away and the other auntie and his uncle had butchered and killed my baby. When he said it, I knew it was true. It had to be because we ate lots of stews, cold cuts, and dishes you'd call beef strogen.
off. we seemed to have quite a bit of meat. it was baby my old Pony who we all loved who we were eating. She hadn't gone to the Fox Farm, she hadn't gotten the bloat I Never asked my father or my mother if it was true but I knew it was and if I did today if they were alive I know they would swear up and down on the Bible that it just wasn't true. But oh yes, yes, very much so Yes I knew there are some ways you just can't fool a child for that's for for for for.
Pretty good story , reminds me of my childhood, knowin that things need to die so we could eat. But then, you leave me, alone…with the fire, thinkin, contemplating. Funny thing about a fire, its more than a place to get warm, its a place to be comfortable with the world around you. You can console to it, empty your heart out to it, stare into it while you consider what life is and isn't. Its more than friend, its a companion, that will always be there for you. Thank you for lending me yours, if for only a brief moment in time, it was enjoyable.
Wipes away a single tear…That was beautiful.
Kids can be such little bastards!
I was a child of three in Europe and my grand parents gave my sister a horse as a present when we where there on the farm to me they gave a pig. As the pig grew over time and the horse pulled the plow there came a fall day when my pip came up missing. it was cool that day, days when the smell of coffee, eggs and bacon would hang in the air. There was no coffee or eggs, it was the smell of a pig, my pig being singed of its hair. Part of the butchering process in the old world. Sausage, chops, ham and other assorted cuts of pork was shared by all of the kin folk that day. My pig soon was replaced with another only to suffer the same fate next fall.
The cousin in my head immediately was Nellie Oleson.
What kind of wood are you burning there? Looks like hardwood, burns like pine.
Nice work! Steering the channel in new directions, good stuff…
From colder than a hooker's heart, Sweden, Happy new year to you and your's.
Looking forward to a whole new load of Bumblefuckery in 2024…
Great story from the best story voice since Jean Shepherd.
The hard lessons of life tend to be the most poignant.
Growing up a little bit at a time usually, with a few sudden jolts here and there…
…if we are lucky.
We shouldn't let Governments of the world get us to such a poor state ever again!
As soon as you said depression, child, and pet horse most of us knew where the story was going.
I was about the same age when my dad acquired a runt pig. I was put to the task of raising him. He was a cute little run that I instantly became attached to. I named him, Squealer. He became my closest friend for several months. He would walk with me every morning to the end of the drive and wait with me for the school bus. When I got on the bus he would run after the bus as fast as his little legs would go. When the bus brought me home, he would come down and greet me where the bus dropped me off. I must have been doing a good job of feeding Squealer because he was getting a lot bigger as time went on. One day I came home and Squealer wasn't there to greet me as usual. Mom and Dad seemed pretty tight lipped when I asked where Squealer was. A few days later we went to my Grandpa's farm and there out in the middle of the lot was a pile of the inards of some animal that had been butchered. I was totally devasted for a while. As I look back upon it 60 years later it reminds me of the ole Ray Stephens song about a pig that he had. The best line in the song goes something like, He was my buddy, he was my friend, heck, he was my breakfast every now and then!