With Chores Done, Work Begins

GOLD, an aunt called it - cream was gold and eggs were gold because the money from cream and eggs went to the house, went for cloth to sew into dresses or curtains or a new oilcloth with red flowers printed against green leaves for the kitchen table. Gold that poured out in a thick stream, cream into the tall cream bucket and milk into a regular bucket to be fed back to the calves or stored in milk cans to take into town to the creamery.

With milking done, chores done, it was time to eat breakfast before starting work. Food five times a day. Breakfast, forenoon lunch, dinner, afternoon lunch and supper. Each time a meal. Breakfast would almost always be strips of meat fried in butter and a huge pan of raw fried potatoes peeled the night before and left to soften all night. Or pancakes. Piles of pancakes with syrup made from a metal can of syrup concentrate that came in the shape of a log cabin and when it was empty and licked and relicked and rinsed we could cut holes in it and play that it was a house for little stick men and machinery.

By seven the chores were done and breakfast was done and it was time to go to work and all worked, young, old, all, and if we were too young to work we went with and "helped" those who did work. -PATHNAME- /usr/local/etc/httpd/plweb/DBGROUPS/paper/database/tape/92/sep/day30/30132.