Introduction, by Charles Kuralt, Page 3 of 4

Cooking in that house, a more or less constant activity from morning to night, was done on a woodstove in the kitchen. What was cooked came from the garden -- sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beets, butterbeans; or from the fields -- blackeyed peas, corn and collard greens; or from the pantry -- this same food in bright rows of Mason jars, put up for the winter along with apple butter and apple jelly. (No real farm of that day or this was without apple trees.)

Milk was provided by two milk cows, eggs by the chickens in the chicken coop (and boiled chicken on Sunday by some luckless hen that had stopped laying). And marvelous, hard, salt-cured country ham came from my grandfather's smokehouse. (I resisted thinking about where the ham really came from until, one autumn, the brutality and squealing and blood of hog- slaughtering day intruded on my childhood idyll. That was the day that resolved me never to be a farmer.)

We lived pretty much outside the money economy. I know we bought staples like cornmeal, which came in flowered fifty-pound sacks intended to be turned into girls' blouses and skirts. And my grandparents must have also bought salt and sugar and the like. But nearly all our food was homegrown, and since we didn't raise beef cattle, I was considerably older before I tasted my first hamburger.

This self-sufficiency extended also to clothing. although my grandmother's Sunday dress and her hats and shoes and my grandfather's boots must have been purchased in town. Nearly everything was stitched up on a treadle-powered sewing machine (patented by Elias Howe about a hundred years earlier), probably the most useful thing in the house.

There were cast-iron wood-burning stoves for heating the bedrooms, but they were never used because they were too much trouble to keep lighted. Everybody slept under piles of quilts on cold nights, then dashed downstairs in the morning and dressed in the warm kitchen, which was the center of life, winter and summer.

The technology of the working farm, like most of that of the farmhouse, was centuries old -- the technology of ax, plow and harrow. My grandfather cultivated his fields by plodding behind a mule from dawn until dusk, as yeoman farmers always had done. He harvested his crops and brought them in to the barn in a mule cart, then took them to market in a mule-drawn wagon. Later, an automobile came into the family -- that of my Aunt Trixie, who had come home ill from teacher's college -- but there was little use for a car in the settled life of the farm; you cannot use a Chevrolet to plow a furrow.

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