So her, “Go get some kindling, if you want any breakfast.” The last part is all about motivation. She knows I am a kid and always hungry and will eat, in her words, “whatever is set on the table.” Me going and getting the kindling is the immediate task but getting me up to go get it is helped by the gnawing sounds coming from my stomach.
At least she didn’t tell me to go get some eggs from the hen house. I don’t mind getting eggs but I never had any house slippers and don’t remember seeing anybody but really old people wearing them, so I would have to go outside and get in the chicken house in bare feet. I am not so much worried about getting some dreaded disease as I am about stepping in too many poo piles and tracking that in the house.
Mom would remind me to walk on the grass and turn my feet on the sides to scrape off anything that might be stuck there. My feet had to be clean so I could walk on mom’s moped linoleum in the kitchen unless I wanted to get yelled at.
If I did get eggs, I had to wash off any poo stuck on the sides of the shell. Sometimes in the laying process there will be a fine, fuzzy, feather stuck fast to the shell. Those are pulled off. And if you happened upon an old nest on the floor in chicken house then you had to hold each one up next to a candle to see if there was a baby chicken inside. If there was, you had to throw that egg away.
There have been times when mom was breaking eggs for breakfast and into the bubbling grease would fall a baby chick with the yolk sac. If anybody saw it happen then mom would throw the whole skillet-full away or feet it all to the dogs. There was no dog food in those days and dogs ate table scraps and leftovers.
I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker when I was young but did drink some if we had fresh cream and leftover sugar from our World War II allotment. I liked it sweet and creamy looking. The US Army cured me of that so now I drink it black and as close to being bitter as I can make it.
I got a new Keurig coffee maker and talk about strong! Wow. But it is delicious and so reminds of of Army coffee drunk straight out of a canteen cup. The other day I read on Yahoo how to make a great cup of coffee and I made it and it was superior to any coffee I have ever tasted.
Use two tablespoons of ground coffee—put it in a filter bag. Pour 6 ounces of boiling water in a cup and dunk the coffee in the filter bag up and down until the water looks like strong coffee. Sit down. Take a sip.