Re: hog jowls, black-eyed peas, and collard greens on New Year's Day

Spent my summers on the farm, mostly.  People don't realize it but it
can, or used to in my youth, snow deep heaps in the winter up in the
Valley.  "Up" from where I lived just inside the DC line.

Homer was a chicken fixer (No, he didn't perform spaying
operations.), ham smoker (No...), sausage maker, fruit canner...  The
appropriate term for a a bowl full of greens was a "mess of greens" .
Rockingham County was turkey country.  When I was there in the
winter, you'd chip away the cap of water in the big kitchen bucket,
ladle it into a white porcelain pan, pour on some boiling water from
off the wood fired kitchen stove, wash up, and then throw the soapy
water into the hog's slop bucket to be mixed with meal and fed to the
filthy mean critters.  I got to band lambs tails.  (They're born with
long tails that soon got messy and had to get cut off.  The band was
to numb the tail and hold off the blood.)  And the first time I held
a chicken when my grandfather chopped off the head, he laughed his
ass of as I got bloodied and thought I looked the devil in the eye
when the headless critter leaped from my grip and raced all around
me.   I tossed apples in the 2-mule driven cider press back in the
orchard.  Even shot and ate groundhog.  Listened to the Grand Ole
Opry on WWVA. But, no, no New Year's Dinner  up there.  He'd come
down to DC for the holidays.  We had turkey or ham like proper
suburbanites.

Feeling obligated to return to preservation topics...you'll see
Homer's work, what little is left of it, up and down the Valley from
Harrisonburg, Va.  (He was born and buried in Pleasant Valley, lived
in Mt. Crawford.)  The early stuff is mortice and tenon barns and
sundry outbuildings.  When Homer "planned" a house, he came to the
site with a bag full of wood stakes and a mallet---tromped all
around, felt the wind, asked, "You want a big dining room or a little
one?"  "You gunna have a well, cisterns or both?"  And like
questions.

As the Mennonite boy said as he pointed to the hen house where the
music was coming from..."Them's the critters what gives you yer aigs."

That's where my scrapple came from.

--Jim