Abby got a Spy Kit for Christmas, and it delighted me to watch her unpack all the elements. I still aim to find joy in small things: a barely-working compass, a disappearing pen, and messages coded so secretly that only a red lens reveals the true message. I felt disillusioned when I learned how to read the text without the red gels.

This picture is of our family friend, Jared Wright, a fully grown man who works at a bank.

We kept a charge account at Cobb’s Country Store. I used it to buy a lot of junk I did not need nor could our family afford. Our only source of income, except in the Fall when we sold cotton, was from the sale of milk to the local Carnation Milk Company. We three boys would milk about ten to twelve cows per day. At night, when we were through milking, we would strain it once or, sometimes, twice. It was gross what we caught in the strainer. If the cow put her foot in the bucket, which they often did, we would curse and pull her foot out and continue milking—just double up on the straining pads.

After a cow had had a calf we would allow the calf to get two teats and we milked the other two to sell. We would fill two ten gallon cans with the morning and evening milking. The cans were then put in a wooden 55 gallon barrel and we poured water around them until they floated, which kept the milk from souring. If it soured, the Carnation Company would send it back. We learned that one could put baking soda in the soured milk and send it back the next day and they would accept it. They later wised up and put food coloring in the bad milk. It was only good for the hogs after that. We also tried to beat the system by adding a couple gallons of water to each ten gallon can. Supposedly, one was paid based on the milk’s butter fat content and the overall weight. Our modifications only helped our earnings.

Later, we learned that our milk truck owner and driver, who owned no cows, received a bigger milk check than anyone on the route. He would stop on the route, take his own milk cans and fill them with a gallon or so from his customers. The moral of this whole story is that there is always a way to cheat, even in the most non-lucrative trades.

The only soap I ever used until almost grown was “lye” soap—homemade soap crafted in the wash pot with lye, which had to be “Red Devil” lye. This soap was used for bathing, washing, and any soap needs in the family. It had quite a smell, and not a good one.

After my Mother had rubbed the clothes on the rub board in the hot water, she would put them in the rinsing side. The rinsing water had a coloring we referred to as “blueing” where the water would look sky blue. After we got through washing and hanging the clothes on the line, we would have our baths, where Mother would put us boys in the tub that carried the color of the sky.

To get a twelve or thirteen-year-old in a number two washtub was quite a chore. Our old house sat near the little gravel and dirt road where a tree offered little shield from the few passerbys. We were so embarrassed. We would try to duck down when a car passed since out in the country we could tell who was coming by the sound of their car. This bathing practice kept up until we rebelled at fourteen and started heating our water in the sun in a tub behind the house where we could hide.

Bathing was at best in a washpan that held about a half-gallon of water. Later on, as times got better, we heated the water on the stove. We would take a pan of cold water and set it on the back door steps and wash our feet and often remark that we “washed up as far as possible and down as far as possible, but ‘possible’ only got washed about once a week.”

Hog Killing Day

At our estate, hog killing day was quite an exciting time for all of our family. We usually got to miss school to supposedly help with the chores. The day just had to be the coldest day of the year or, at least as kids, we had to think that it was. Late November was usually about the best time since it was normally cold and dry. Both cold and dry were needed for the meat to keep. We normally killed five large hogs each year, one for each member of the family. Lard was as important as the meat since if you had lard and corn for corn meal and flour you could just about make it along with the vegetables grown.

We would start the day by going to our neighbor’s house and borrowing his 22 rifle and my daddy would attempt to shoot him right between the eyes. Most of the time he did. As soon as the hog hit the ground, Frank Morris, a large and very muscular black man, would jump down over the hog with a long, very sharp butcher knife and slit the hog’s heart to make him bleed as much as possible so the meat would not be dark. Frank would always have a glass nearby so he could catch the fresh, hot blood. He would drink two or three glasses of the hot blood.

Some of us children would get a piece of hollow cane and put in the bladder and blow it up like a balloon. It was quite a contest to see who was the best at this sport.

As soon as the hog was killed, it was put in a barrel placed in the ground at a 45 degree angle and “soughed” several times in the scalding water. The smell of the hog hair was not very pleasant. We would then scrape the hair and singe the remaining hair before gutting the hog. All the fat was cooked off in a large, black wash pot. What little lean was left on the fat of the cooking we had for cracklins, and the rest for lard. Some people made “blood” puddings, but I must say that I did not ever eat any.

Hog killing day was always quite a happy day for us: plenty of fresh tenderloins and sausage, and we felt we had arrived.

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This was the first Sunday Greg’s been gone since his resignation two weeks ago. Some committed volunteers stepped up to guide the music team in his absence, but a palpable nervous feeling measured heavy on the minds of those of us behind the scenes this morning. As I know the story, Greg elevated the service from a church with good intentions to a church with polish. And so the nervous feeling around the church asks, “Who’s going to shine the shoes now?”

That’s a frustrating place to be in because there’s a realization and grief period that everyone who enjoyed the fruits of the last four years has to go through. Working under Greg was a training ground for me as I learned the ropes of the job. It was a great place to participate in a beautiful service for the music and tech teams. Greg has the skill to let people practice, and mess up, yet tie up loose ends and make sure things go well anyway, so the pressure has stayed low on me and others for the past two years.

Today was a day of healing because after a good service I had a brainstorm with three different band members, and already the sadness from this event has been cut by exciting ideas for the future. I’m one for a challenge and I’m looking forward to creating a good Sunday service at Powell Church. With polish. I say, bring on those dirty shoes—I’ve got loads of Kiwi in my office.

I did manage to break the non-functional buttons at the top, so enjoy how that works less now than it did before.

*UPDATE May 3* I’ve fixed all the now-functional banner buttons, with hover effects and all! That has been hanging me up for a while (it’s a small detail that I had no experience implementing). Next two big goals: fix the “categories” view (click on one of the now functioning links and enjoy the broken layout) and then create a functioning sidebar with image snippets and better navigation features.

Some things have changed: no more big black picture in the middle of the screen. And, hey, the blog came back!

The day I took the blog away, Mary Ann wanted it back. I tried to put it back but had a big problem with write permissions and other annoying server errors. So, I changed hosting to InMotion Hosting and have been building rabbitwife.com back out.

We plan to return with fresh resolve to communicate our creativity on this Web site. I’m working through Digging Into WordPress and building the theme, but content will begin flowing in the next 30 days.