A grocery holiday

When I was a very small boy, most of our food was home grown. My grandmother cared for a large garden which would feed at least six people for most of the year and we raised a hog for meat. The unfortunate porker usually met his fate around Thanksgiving so that we would have fresh ham for the holiday. The remainder was salt cured and then placed in cotton sacks and hung in the smokehouse or was canned and used as needed.
As with most families, there were always things to be bought from a nearby country store or a grocery store in town. A week or so ago I wrote about one such country store and now I will tell you a little about the in town store shopping. One hog is never enough to provide for a family for a full year. One reason is that my grandmother insisted on taking most of the fat for cracklings or to make lye soap. Cracklings are made by scraping the fat from the inside of a hog's hide and baking it. Ever eat a pork rind? Same idea except crackings were small yellowish looking pieces and very greasy. They were mostly added to cornbread of which we ate a lot. We had no such things as "shortening" back then to cook with; everything that needed grease for cooking was done with hog lard. Seeing as how grandma used most of the fat to keep us clean by making soap, we had need of buying cooking lard elsewhere. From the early 1930's until about 1942, the family was fortunate because my granddad owned a grocery store next door to their house. Failing health and war rationing forced him to close the store. The local store for us then became Arney's which I mentioned earlier, but sometimes we were in need of things from town and a trip to the grocery store was called for. Such a trip meant one of my uncles walking or hitching a ride to Jonesboro and a visit to Baskett's Grocery Store which was located where the story telling headquarters building now sits. My uncle would hand Mr. Baskett a list and he would deliver the order at his convenience, usually the same day and my uncle would ride back home in the green Ford pickup truck. It was a big day for everyone when the truck backed up to the front porch steps; other than the groceries, it was much like a holiday. I would usually get a candy treat, my mom would get a tube of lipstick or some other accessory, my uncles would get cigarettes, my grandmother would get a large sack of feed for her chickens and a another huge sack full for the hog if it was getting close to killing time and she would get spools of thread if needed, and granddad would get a plug of chewing tobacco and a newspaper. My grandmother was especially pleased with her livestock feed, for she would use the empty sacks to make herself dresses and underclothing by using her very old Singer foot-treadle powered sewing machine. The sacks were usually made of cotton and looked like they had come from a fabric seller. Nearly all of my mom's and aunt's clothing was made by hand from feed and flour sacks when they were growing up. These occasions only came around no more than once each month and after my granddad died in the summer of 1948, they became less frequent. There were no more hogs raised for slaughter and her flock of chickens dwindled to none over the next few years. But times were still good for a young boy in the country, and were about to become better for both grandma and me as a new and more convenient way of buying groceries was introduced into our bucolic lifestyle; namely Paul Good's Rolling Store. More on that later.
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Have a pleasantly exciting Tuesday!
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