Ronda Rich
Syndicated Columnist
It was something someone said about all the Thanksgivings that her eyes have seen that made me start thinking about a couple of holidays.
In the mountains, it was always the tradition to kill a fattened hog after the first hard freeze so people could store them in their smoke houses, keeping the meat cold.
My Daddy was like Atticus Finch. He didn’t hunt or shoot regularly. but when he tossed off his glasses, raised that rifle to his shoulder, he never missed. One shot did it. There is one Thanksgiving that I remember vividly. I was 9.
Mama sewed me a cute new outfit to wear to my grandparents’ little tin-roofed shack, a tree house my cousins made out in the woods (no girls allowed) and two-story barn that looked no similar to the little house. Maw-Maw kept her washer tub with a wringer out on the back porch. It was a big step up from the washboard and creek that she had used for years.
On this particular Thanksgivings, my aunts, uncles and array of cousins arrived for the day. For months, PawPaw had been fattening up a hog that would feed them through the months to come.
Daddy took his rifle from the car trunk, loaded it then headed for the back yard. My cousin, Susan, and I stopped playing baby dolls long enough to watch. The hog, in a pen, near the barn, fell dead with one prefect shot from Daddy.
All day long, they sweated as they “dressed” the hog, using a large butcher knife to cut first the tenderloin, then moving to bacon and ham. In an enormous black cast pot set atop a low burning fire, they boiled the fat into cracklings for cornbread. I won’t go into all the details because those of you who are city folks probably wouldn’t enjoy it.
From the black pot would also come lard, the fat boiled down, to be used in homemade biscuits. Crisco is a lard substitute in making biscuits but nothing makes a more delicious biscuit than lard. You can find it on the grocery store shelf. But let me warn you: it costs MORE than Crisco.
As we pranced around with our games and climbed to the barn loft to tell stories, Daddy and Pawpaw worked all day, Pawpay in overalls and Daddy wearing navy work pans and an old striped dress shirt. The work was hard and standing over that boiling was hot so he stripped down to his T-shirt, even though the temperature hovered around 40 degrees. Mama came out and collected the meat that my grandparents would can or that Mama would put in our freezer back home.
When I grew up, Thanksgivings were very different from the Appalachians. One year, I worked the day at USA Today, then had a quiet supper alone. Once, during the two that I lived in Indianapolis, three friends came to visit: Jimmy, his wife Sharon and Jimmy’s brother. We laughed, we ate, then we took their truck out and found a Christmas tree lot. Those two guys dragged that tree up to my second story apartment and we laughed happily as decorated it.
“The way to a friend’s house is never far,” read a magnet that Sharon bought me. I kept it on my fridge for 25 years until I somehow managed to knock it off and break it. I still think about it and the friends who traveled almost nine hours to have a home cooked Thanksgiving meal with me.
For 28 years, I hosted a big gathering for Thanksgiving, then COVID-19 struck. The following year, we had the Waffle House truck, which was exceeding joy.
This year, it will be just Tink, me and the dogs, snuggled before a fire. Our dinner will be meat loaf, my famous mac and cheese, peas and homemade biscuits.
I will be most thankful for surviving a very sad 2024 because of friends lost.
But, at least, I survived. Barely.
Ronda Rich did have some good news in 2024. Her new book, “Sapelo Island: A Stella Bankwell Mystery,” released on October 29, is a bestseller. Thank you for all who made this happen