Southern Rite of Passage

- October 28, 2020

When my brothers and I were growing up, many a late summer evening found us gathered around the living room at my grandparent house watching Ranger games, performing a ritual as ubiquitous as to be a rite of passage in the south. I am of course talking about shelling peas, shucking corn, and prepping vegetables for storage after harvest.

I remember dreading shelling peas before we got started but then enjoying it all the same, especially when Papaw started telling his stories.

Many of you found yourselves during harvest time gathered on front porches, living rooms, or kitchens huddled over washtubs or buckets while parents, grandparents, or even great grandparents shared stories to pass the time.

Storing vegetables was crucial in times where money could be tight, in hard times, meat could be acquired through hunting, fishing, or butchering livestock but vegetables could only be had in certain times of year and some like beans and potatoes were hardy and could nourish large families even when meat was hard to come by. My grandfather and uncle Max have told us stories about hunting and eating squirrel, rabbit, deer, and the like, but one needs more than just meat to survive.

In this crazy time of COVID, many of us fell back on these gardening and canning skills learned in times past when we didn’t know if we would be the next ones to lose our jobs due to COVID.

As families gathered around stories would be shared. Many children grew up hearing their family stories or even Bible stories by parents or grandparents while shelling peas or canning pickles or potatoes. These menial tasks can cause memories to take root in children lasting a lifetime. Some of the stories shared here on this blog were stories my grandfather told us boys while we were gathered around five-gallon buckets or washtubs in their living room while the Rangers were on TV.

These stories about harvesting and preparing vegetables were told to me by my dad.

There used to cornfields where Hamilton Lane is now located in Mildred. According to my dad, the whole area where the neighborhood is now were cornfields and there was a large white house on Providence Road backing up to the fields near where the Richter’s house is currently located.

My grandfather drove my dad and my uncle Mark there where they filled up the bed of the truck to the brim with corn they picked. They were up until the early hours of the morning shucking corn while my grandmother was bagging and putting it in the freezer as fast as they were shucking it. They ate corn on the cob all year long. My dad fondly remembers it as excellent corn.

My grandparents also had a large garden at what we call ‘The White Place,’ named after the family that lived there and from whom we leased the land. My grandfather bought the land from the White family years later, but we still call it ‘The White Place’. It is in the Grape Creek bottom south of Navarro and is very fertile.

One year, they had a bumper crop of red potatoes from that garden. My dad, Mark, and Mamaw were peeling what seemed like a mountain of potatoes when Mamaw had a great idea. Instead of peeling each of them individually, they would run them through the washing machine. She must of run them through on the gentle cycle.

They came out beautifully and perfectly peeled, but my dad never found out how she got all the potato peelings out of the washer. If that was my wife, that would have been my problem! He said he remembers those potatoes looked beautiful once jarred and could have taken a prize at the fair.

Farming and prepping food is something we try to pass onto our kids. We have a garden and my sons and nephews help plant and tend plants, then harvest and prep. My boys loved helping shuck corn and make pickles even though getting them to eat vegetables is like pulling teeth! One of my oldest son’s, Noah’s, favorite memory is gathering pecans with my uncle Mack. Every time he sees a pecan, he says “Daddy, you remember when Mack and I picked pecan’s at Nanny and Pop’s old house, that was a good day!”

If you have the time and place, I highly recommend you grow a garden and include your kids in taking care of the vegetables and prep them for storage. You never know what memories they are going to hold onto. You never know if something funny happens that they can pass on or if it is just a ‘good day’ and fond memory