REMEMBERING THE GOOD OLD DAY'S

We always had a good sized garden, different kinds of fruit trees, chickens, pigs and calves for our meat. There were cows for milk and butter and two hard working mules to pull my pops farming equipment for plowing and harrowing the fields where he mostly planted corn and alfalfa. The corn was used for all sorts of things, but mostly food for the animals and also he made molasses and sold it. I loved to dip a short stick of cane that I had chewed one end to make it bushy, into the boiling foam of the molasses. I burned my mouth many time. And to just chew on the sweet cane tasted pretty good also, though it had a way of splitting my tongue while chewing on it. The mules were switched off periodically pulling the tongue around in a circle that went to the big bin that caught the juice from the cane as it was ground by this procedure. Then the juice was dumped into a huge long metal bin with fire under it to boil the juice into molasses. Prier to this everyone helped stripping the cane so it could go through the process of being juiced for the molasses of which was quite a task and hard on the hands. Those same mules pulled a wagon when needed which was quite often, for all sorts of odd jobs. They hauled water, brush, wood for cooking and the heating stove in the winter. Work slowed down a bit in the winter as there was often snow on the ground in this show me state of Missouri.