by Hub Brown

When we were little kids and went to country schools, if the teacher could get to school there would be school that day. There were no school buses in those days, you got to school the best way you could. It didn't do any good to wait for the snow plow either, for there were no snow plows. In case of a real bad storm, the farmers would get together and shovel through the deep drifts, but that didn't happen often.

I can remember one bad storm. They had shoveled some drifts and Dad had hitched a colt in the team that day. He was ginger colored, which had given him his name of Ginger. I remember when he came to the first deep drift and, by raising his head as high as he could he could, just see over the top Things must have looked different for this was his first big storm. He snorted and pranced along till he got a little used to this new white world.

When Dad was young he had lived and worked among the Pennsylvania Dutch. He and an old farmer had started out early one morning. That was one thing about those people, they started early and liked to have things done by dark.

Dad said if a family was going to butcher hogs that day, they would have huge cast iron kettles of water boiling over big wood fires by daylight. Families always helped each other so there was always lots of help. They would kill and catch the blood to be used for blood pudding and then scald them to remove the hair then rinsed with hot water and scraped with a real sharp knife. The intestines were removed and the ones to be used for sausages would be flushed out then turned inside out, scraped and put to soak in strong salt water. Then the hams and side meat for bacon would be put in a sugar cure and some for salt pork would go into a plain salt brine. The sausage meat would be ground and seasoned and made ready to be stuffed into the casings. The heads would be split and most of the bones removed. Then cooked and seasoned and put in a cloth sack to drain out most of the fat.

A flat object was then placed on top of the sack and weights to make a cake of headcheese. Another form of parts of the head meat called souse is something I never knew about. The feet were cleaned up and made into pickled pigs feet.

I almost forgot about Dad and the old farmer. They were driving along a hedge and a sow on the other side got up suddenly and the horse reared and started to run down the driveway. The old farmer began to laugh and said, "A horse und a cow."