GOOD MORNING, FRIENDS

A REMEMBERAMBLE for Tuesday, 2/17, 2026

Greetings and salutations. I learned the word "salutations," from a dear friend of mine from early childhood, her name was Charlotte. She was a barn spider of some note in her day. She had a big heart for a spider. She did her best for a friend. Bless her heart, then she died. But she laid thousands of eggs and her babies were everywhere, and the farmer had to spray the whole place with DDT as soon as he got back from the pig sale. Yep, I am plumb awful at times. My apologies to E.B. White and Dawn Baker. Which, while we are on the subject of hogs/pigs, let me talk about hog raising for a bit. Early settlers and pioneering people raised hogs because no other farm animal was as valuable for food, and/or as practical as hogs. You could not eat chicken everyday or you would run out of chickens soon enough. A steer was nice but those were not practical for daily family meals, no dirt farmer in our region could have beef every day. Hogs were the "Goldilocks" of farm critters, they were just right in so many ways. If a family killed a few hogs each fall or winter, and smoked, cured, and prepared the meat in various ways, they would have "hog meat," throughout the entire year. Many folks smoked meat, but generally cured more than they smoked. When I was a boy, those who killed their own hogs generally cured meat and no longer smoked any, they would take theirs to a local slaughterhouse and pay them to smoke their hams or shoulders, as well as sausage. A good number of older folks would take their hogs to a local slaughterhouse, such as D.C. Lanier's between here and Metter, or McAfee's in Wrightsville, or another, have it processed, cured, the sausage made etc., and then hang the meat in their smokehouse which was no longer used for anything but hanging the meat. Speaking of sausages, it is interesting that you can take a batch of sausage meat, season it, and stuff some into casings, and make patties of the rest, the taste and texture will be different although they are the same batch. I love country ham which some find too salty, and I will eat smoked ham, but I want it sliced thin and fried. Daddy was a fool for country ham and I am walking his footsteps as for as his taste in foods. He grew up on country ham, homemade lard and buttermilk biscuits, sweet potatoes, cane syrup, mullet fish, and fried cornbread. As I have said before, I was like daddy about mullet and syrup, and like him, loved cold leftover mullet for breakfast, mashed with a fork into cane syrup, with cold butter and sour cream too. It was so good to sop that up with hot biscuits. Now we also ate cold butter and sour cream with no mullet too, because we didn't have leftover mullet all of the time. I still like cold butter and cold sour cream in cane syrup sopped with a hot biscuit. I was almost grown before I found out folks ate sour cream with other things. I was like the country boy from backwoods rural Georgia daddy told of. He was so poor and so backwoods that he had never even been to town. So, he worked hard to save a little bit of money to do just that, to go to town and do all of the things folks said you was to do when you went to town. He went to the "picture show," ate popcorn and a hot dog, and bought a "cold Co-Colar," walked into the stores and looked, then went to a cafe to eat. He had the lunch special and when he was finished, the waitress walked over and asked him if he wanted dessert. He said he reckoned he would have a piece of pie. She asked, "what kind of pie do you want?" Outraged, he jumped up, and hollered, "sweet tater pie, whut other kind is they?" A rube never wants to be "took fer a rube." I hope you enjoyed this bit of a visit with me, I surely have.

Numbers 6: 24-26, KJV

we boyz three, babee conway, lil merle, & me