There are lots of little things I remember about my grandmother, especially when I find myself doing them. Peeling and cutting apples this morning for apple sauce and apple butter, I remembered that she peeled the apples around, starting at the top and working her way down. When the apple was peeled, she used the same small paring knife to cut around the apple from stem to base and back up the other side. Because the knife was too short to go all the way through the apple, breaking it in two required a twisting motion. Then she cut it into quarters, cut out the core and cut smaller pieces over the pot. It really is such a small thing, hardly worth remembering. But I remembered her hands performing these motions as I was cutting the apple in half, around from stem to base and back up, splitting it with a twisting motion. It was a moment that I felt close to my long-dead grandmother who taught me to feel comfortable in the kitchen.
But not just in the kitchen. She is the reason I want to be a farmer. When I visited her in summers, she put me to work in the garden; weeding, harvesting, whatever needed to be done. Then we took the harvest to the kitchen, and she showed me what to do with it, either cooking supper for that evening or canning and freezing for the future. We picked blackberries from a patch in a cow pasture with June bugs flying all around it. Then we carried our buckets of berries to the kitchen and made pies, jam and jelly.
Every year around Thanksgiving my grandfather killed a few pigs, and my family was usually there to help. My brother and I were there for the killing and then helped as we could with the butchering. It was a family farm. Everyone did what they could. When cuts of meat started going to the kitchen I went with them. We canned chunks of pork in canning jars and froze larger cuts of meat wrapped in butcher paper. The most fascinating part of the process to me, though, was watching my grandfather cure the hams. In a tiny, old house that used to be his home when he and my grandmother first married, he laid out boards on saw horses to make tables. Each ham was laid out on the boards with some space between them. He poured seasoned salt in big piles on each ham and then turned them, carefully rubbing the salt into every part of the ham. When he was done, each ham was hung from a board above his head by a rope and left just like that for months at a time. It was winter, so the little house would have been cold enough, I guess. But I didn’t understand at the time that it was the seasoned salt that preserved the meat and gave it the taste and textured that I loved.
The thing I have to remind myself is that, as much as I would like to remember otherwise, my grandparents’ farm was not self-sufficient. My grandfather always had a full-time job. Before I was around, he worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority building dams. After I came along he was working as a machinist in a zinc mine, and every day he got up early to do farm chores before he left, and came home from work to do more farm chores before supper. My grandmother worked hard at home all day to keep them fed and clothed, and yes, as difficult as that life was, it’s all I’ve ever wanted for myself.
