Fall Musings

The fog is so thick this morning, I can barely make out the outline of the big maple at the edge of my back yard. I love the view out my back windows, especially in the morning and especially in the fall. I love watching the sun come up and paint the trees with yellow and gold. The dogwoods blaze with crimson and sometimes the deer creep out of the brush to welcome the day. I love the nip in the air, the smell of woodsmoke and the rustle of the leaves that carpet my yard. A brown thrasher is scratching industriously under the winter honeysuckle as I write this, reminding me that I need to be looking for my own breakfast. Fall calls for cold weather food – sausage and pancakes, chili and cornbread, bubbling casseroles and apple dumplings. It’s a time for the last bustle of work on the farm, preparing to hunker down for winter. The horses love the crisp air. I read somewhere that horses are happiest in about 40 degree weather. I seem to be happier in cooler weather too, and I have a little more energy when the thermometer dips below the eighty degree mark. I don’t run and buck like the horses do, but at least I can walk a little faster! And there is nothing better than riding on crisp days under a canopy of fall colors. My mom obsesses over the leaves in her yard, but I have found that mine will eventually blow down into the holler behind my house if I just leave them alone. Any leftovers can be chopped up by the mower next spring. The dogs love the leaves – Trace especially likes to burrow into them for his naps. And the little kids that visit love to rake big piles and jump into them. The leaves bring back memories of football games, hayrides and wienie roasts. The full moon these past days has been especially bright. The almanac says it is the Beaver Moon, named by the Indians because it was one of the last chances to trap beavers for the fur that would keep them warm through the winter. I’m not interested in trapping beavers, but I do love to go outside during a full moon, when I don’t even need a flashlight to make the last trip to the barn. When I was growing up, we didn’t do much about Thanksgiving. Usually, Thanksgiving week was reserved for hog killing and our traditional meal around that time centered around fresh tenderloin, freshly ground sausage, and crackling bread. I didn’t like the crackling bread, but I loved the cracklings fresh out of the kettle. I remember watching Gertrude Dansby, who worked for us for years, cooking off the lard and frying cracklings in a huge black kettle in our backyard. I guess the cracklings were sort of the equivalent of pork rinds, but they were much better! After we stopped killing hogs, we started celebrating Thanksgiving in a more traditional way, and this week, my mom’s family will gather at her house for turkey and dressing, cranberry sauce, and all the other good things. It’s great to gather with family to count our blessings and enjoy the bounty of the holiday table. But I think my favorite time of Thanksgiving day is late in the evening, when the rush is over and I can enjoy a plate of leftovers by the fireplace, with my dogs at my feet and a book in my hand. It’s a last breathing space before the Advent and Christmas rush begins. And I am thankful.

Adventures in the Show Ring

National 4-H Week – it surely brings back good memories for me. And I daresay that much of what I learned through my work in that organization have helped me out more in my life and my career than most of what I learned in school.
Of course, being a farm girl, most of my projects in 4-H involved animals. They didn’t have the horse project when I started out or I’m sure it would have been my main focus. Horses were the main focus of just about everything in my life from the time I was able to say the word. But there were plenty of other animals to keep me busy. Beef cattle, swine and sheep were the projects I concentrated on. I could have raised chickens but have I ever mentioned just how much I have always disliked chickens?
The pig shows were always held in March. It was a lot colder in March then than it seems to be now, and my feet were always half frozen, no matter what kind of socks and boots I wore. Pointy pig feet and half-frozen human feet were not a good thing, especially since pigs seem to have a penchant for stepping on those human feet. The local show was held at the fairgrounds and then we went on to the big show at the Nashville Union Stockyard. If there has ever been a colder place in the state than the stockyard, I don’t know where it was. The wind whipped off that river and went right through you. Showing pigs was really pretty simple. They turned all the pigs in a big ring and we had to find our pig and show him off to the judge. We carried long sticks – some were made of wood and some were made of metal – and we used those sticks to guide the pigs around, stopping and starting and trying to show off the pig to his best advantage. Of course, if you had a lesser quality pig, you tried to stay out of the judge’s line of sight until they had weeded out the other lesser quality pigs. But if you had a really good pig, you wanted the judge to see him. It was fun, and I earned a pretty good little bit of spending money with the pigs, but I was always glad to take my poor bruised and frozen feet home at the end of the day.
Oddly enough, we showed lambs in June. I always thought they should have reversed the dates on the pigs and lambs, but I’m sure there was some sort of good reason why they didn’t. Nowdays, the kids have it easy. They have little halters to put on their lambs and they lead them around. We were a hardier group when I was a child. Like the pigs, they just turned all those lambs loose in the ring and we had to find our lamb, catch it and wrestle it over to the wall and try to hang on. We knelt on the ground and held the lambs by the head, or tried to hold them. My lambs were usually pretty tame, but there were always a few who escaped or dragged their handlers across the ring. I remember how soft my hands always were after the show, from the lanolin in the wool.
The biggest shows were always the steer and heifer shows. The steer show was held in December, at the Nashville Union Stockyard, and it was even colder than it was in March! There was a lot more excitement at the cattle shows than the other shows, or at least it seemed that way. The judges were masters of suspense, taking their time selecting their top steers and looking and studying and going back and forth until they would slap one of the calves on the rump and applause would break out. The bidding for the champion steers was lively, and the top calves always brought top dollar. H.G. Hill always bought the grand champion – not because the calf was that much better than all the rest but as a publicity move. Another tradition was eating at the Charlie Nickens barbecue place on Jefferson Street. I don’t know if it was the only restaurant nearby or just the favorite of the adults, but that’s where we always went to eat when we showed livestock at the stockyards. Their menu was shaped like a pig, if I am remembering correctly and their barbecue was great.
I really enjoyed my heifers. The show was in June or July, at the Ellington Agricultural Center, and after the shows, the heifers came back home and raised babies. I could let myself get attached to these sweet calves because I knew they would most likely live out their lives on our farm. We raised Shorthorn cattle, which are known for their gentle dispositions. They come in three colors – red, roan and white. My greatest disappointment was that I never had a white heifer to show. Ironically, my good roan heifer had a white calf the very year I became too old to show in 4-H. A few months earlier and I would have had my wish!
Showing livestock taught me a lot. Winning and losing graciously, the truth that it takes hard work to reach a goal and that sometimes life isn’t fair, that the best part of competition is not necessarily the ribbons and other truths that I only came to appreciate fully as an adult. The prize money I received kept me in spending money all through my teen years, and I made a lot of friends that I still keep in touch with from time to time. The stockyards is gone now, as is Charlie Nickens barbecue. I’m glad I was able to experience those historic spots before they were gone.