Quote Originally Posted by dragmerc View Post
this menu was all we could afford.
i was raised on the low side of poor but always had good food that we mostly raised.
momma only bought dried beans, flour, etc.
we ate beans and taters almost every day of the week, if not for main course, they were the side dish.
we had fried chicken for Sunday dinner(lunch for you yanks) with home canned green beans.
maybe once a month at the most, we had pork chops.
might have had sausage gravy for saturday morning breakfast maybe twice a month before i had to go to tobacco patch.
we had beef roast maybe once a year.
i never heard of steak until i was 16.
did i say we were poor?
but i was rich in good food and the greatest parents.
i've done pretty well in my life but i would trade it all to relive some of those days.
money doesn't make you happy.
i would give $10,000 for one of the meals and the atmosphere momma created on Christmas Eve.
She was one in a billion.
I know what you're saying for sure, you could flip your coin over and the other side would be me, and when your mother and dad are gone on to the other side of life, then all you have of them are memories, and those memories show us that we weren't as poor as we thought, I to was a grown man before I new what a steak tasted like, we raised a garden and mom canned food, I remember as a small boy building a wood fire under a washing tub to heat water to the boiling point, and pour it over a hog we just killed, the boilling water would loosen the hair on the hog so we could use a large knife to scrape the hog, but that fresh hog meat was the best ever, pork now days don't have the same flavor, I wore hand me down clothes, blue jeans with patches on them, went bare footed most of the summer, was a grown man before we had indoor plumbing, used the old outhouse, and in the winter you never visited that building until the need to made you. it was a rough life for me back then, I sometimes get pleasure from thinking back to those days, but wouldn't want to go through that part of my life again if i could, really it seams like another lifetime when I go back there in my mind, i remember we had the food we needed most of the time, most folks will say we were poor but we never went hungry, well I grew up poor, had one of the best mothers that ever lived, my dad was another story, yes I know what being poor is like, and I know what it's like to go to bed hungry, something you will never forget. and it's something that will make you work hard the rest of your life, to make sure that part of your life never shows up again.