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After the long walk we would get back up on the hill to teh farm house and sit down on the front porch and Grandpaw would take a chew and just rock in the chair waitng on breakfast which was a full course breakfast every day. Country Ham, eggs , Fried Potatoes, Red Eye and Sawmill Gravies, Homemade Biscuits all made in a wood burning stove. If you needed water you sent the long tube bucket down a pipe right behind the house and then cranked it back up full of fresh cold water. Yep you guessed it. Another great event was teh trips the the small house out behind the big house. One was a smoke house and the other was 
well ya'll know what the other one was........ 
There was always family and friends stopping by to visit or come for dinner and so many fun things to do. I would go fishing in the River that ran through the farm that was chok full of catfish and if the family was coming for a fish fry GrandPaw would go down to the river and drag out one of his basket nets and take out about 10 of 15 big cats to clean for supper and the whole family sometimes 30 people would come over both family and friends and all the women would prepare this huge supper. Grandpaw grew his own tobacco and made his own what he called Petway Spring Water and he kept it in fruit jars for when company came by.....
Petway was the name of that community the farm was located in and the farm Grandpaw owned was call the Petway Farm cause it was settled by the Petway Family back in the 1860's. The folks that settled that farm are buried in a cemetery on the farm. Grandpaws house was made of Logs and was on the highest hill in the Petway valley and you could see everywhere around the house from the porch that run all the way around it. In the evening just beore dark you could see the deer begin moving out into the pastures all around the house from them porches. I asked Granpaw one time why when we was driving to the general store that he waved his hand at everyone we passed and he said it was just being neighborly is all. I thought that folks should all do that. Man was I wrong cause when I got back home and did it people got mad and said ugly things so I had to stop doing it up Norf as JOJO calls it. Well, I have given alot of thought to those days of vacations down here and when we moved down here the south had not changed in 1967. It was still pretty much the same and each Fall the folks got together for a day of Hog killing in November after the cooler weather came. Thee of four neighbors families got together and they brought their Hogs along and all of the men and boys pitched in to do the other side work which was the things you do when you begin slaughtering hogs with the shooting and guting and scalding and scraping and the big cuts and then the meat went inside to the women and they all pitched in and did the fine cutting and wrapping and the parts going to be smoked went to smoke houses and were packed in the salt for beginning of the aging process. There was a huge black pot with a fire built around it. My job the whole day was to keep that fire burning and that pot hot and that is where the lard was rendered off and the cracklins came from. Hog killing was a tradition just like waving to folks you passed on the highways or sitting on porches when you drove by. Having family dinners with large groups of folks gathering was a part of life. Family Reunions took place every year and you got to meet kin you didn't know you had........ 
neighbors helping neighbors was a way of life in the south, waving to a stranger was part of the south, sipping good shine was part of the south when you stepped up on a friends porch and took a seat. It has been a long time since I have seen any of that happen and I know this may sound dumb but I miss those days......... 
I still have all of those great memories but I miss seeing folks wave and I miss the good dinners that folks use to have and Family Reunions. Don't families exist any longer? Are we strangers even within our own families? I hear people pass things off or place the blame for things ending because of Progress. Well I think when Progress comes between family or neighbors and friends it is not progress. It is Ignorance. Well that is my writings for today. Probably should have wrote something politically motivated but just wanted to know if other folks ever think about the good days back when the south was still the southern traditions were morally correct and not all full of Progress?Statistics: Posted by softbaitmaker — Sun Oct 07, 2007 9:25 pm
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