Barefoot Memories of a Hillbilly - To Market, To Market

We’ve survived the two-week Christmas break, and have worked hard enough to have finished stripping baccer for one of the farms we rent. Besides the small farm and baccer allotment the folks own, they also lease three other farms that have baccer bases on them. In the old days, a farmer just planted and farmed the amount of baccer determined by farm size or acreage, how much you could manage, and what your equipment would support. Now, with the government’s involvement, it’s predetermined how many pounds per your farm’s size they think you should be allowed to sell at market.

When you lease or rent a farm the way we do, Pap becomes responsible for the care, maintenance and upkeep of the entity of the properties. In return, we use the pastures for our cattle, the dead timber for our heat, the extra ground for food crops such as corn and taters, the hay fields to feed the stock during the winter months, and we grow the baccer and share the profits (after major expenses such as fertilizer is portioned out) with the landowners. The land owners are kin to Pap, though one of the owners is related to both Pap and to Mom’s half-sister. Thru the years, as the family has grown, so has the amount of land leased and baccer crops grown.

Thru the past two weeks, we’ve kept up the pace so that the second crop, (also our biggest,) was loaded up this morning and taken to market. The weather tried not to cooperate with loading, but we worked it out. You see, with all the rains and skiffs of snow this week, the ground was soft and as the old folks say, the bottom had fell out. There was no way to get the old truck thru all that mud to load it, and the extra weight on the truck would sink it, making it impossible to get out. Pap says if bad came to worse, the baccer could be loaded onto tarps on the farm wagon, hauled by trailer to the house and then reloaded onto the old truck.

Instead, yesterday afternoon the temp started dropping for the next incoming cold front. After supper, the ground was froze solid. So Pap drove the truck into the driveway of the barn, where the truck was loaded with the baccer straight from the press, and covered securely and anchored solidly to keep it from drying out or freezing. After loading the truck we left it sitting in the barn. Overnight the ground harden to concrete rigidity and Pap just went out and drove the truck atop the frozen ground. It was solid enough that the truck had no trouble.

With the folks going to the baccer market, which is known to be the coldest place in the world, Mom’s left us a few tasks to do, but for the most part it will be a great day to put together a large 500 piece jigsaw puzzle, maybe a few crossword puzzles, a Sacket book western by Louis Lamour, and a few Vienna sausage and crackers shared about for lunch. This afternoon I’ll take a few recent leftovers and introduce them to each other into a mater juice hot tub. That and a quick pone of cornbread will go a long way to feed the family and warm all the corners of Mom and Pap’s shivers. I believe it’s gonna be an excellent time. Just like the rhyme, the baccer is off to market, to market, to buy a….

I wear shoes now, but sometimes I have barefoot memories.