There are times that you just have to believe in signs. Or ghosts. Personally, I have always believed in both.
There are those who say that it’s going to be a bad winter if a wooly worm has a heavy coat, or there’s a lot of them, or the black band on its back is wide, or if it’s brown, or if you see them crawling around before the first frost. I don’t know what is right. I’ve read that you can’t tell by that because the people have studied them have seen several on the same day with a heavy coat and without a heavy coat, with a brown band and a black band. That’s too detailed for me. I think if you notice them that you’re going to have a bad winter. I say to just expect a bad winter.
I saw my first wooly worm at the first part of August this year. I thought that was early. I’m going to pay attention and see if we have an early frost. Then I’m going to pay attention and see if we have an early snow. I hope not. Personally, I’d just as soon not have a frost this year, or any snow. I hope that it’s a really mild winter. But that doesn’t help, does it?
I mean if it doesn’t get cold enough then the mosquitos and fleas and ticks will never die. Of course last year it was really cold and it doesn’t seem that any of them died off. But it was too cold last year to put hams in salt. The salt wouldn’t take. You wonder how I know that, don’t you. Well, my husband cures country hams. Last year we couldn’t put any hams into the salt because when it was time it was too cold. The year before it was too hot and we lost 7 hams. There’s not a ham one in our smoke house right now. We’re going to have ham withdrawal. My friends who share our hams know what I’m talking about. Hopefully this year won’t be all sausage.
Did you know that if it rains on Easter Sunday it’ll rain for the next 7 Sundays. If it’s nasty on Palm Sunday it’ll be pretty for Easter Sunday. There’s all kinds of sayings like that.
I have ghost stories. I should probably wait to tell them. But I have two that relate to the farm and one of them I thought about a lot last week while we were putting up corn. The first one is that while I was pregnant with my youngest daughter I had a lot of early labor. The doctor put me to bed early. As long as I didn’t do a lot I did fine. But there were times that I would wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. There were lots of nights that I would feel like there was somebody in the house. Once or twice I would see what appeared to be someone standing in the doorway over by our refrigerator in the kitchen. You know how you look out of the corner of your eye and have to do a double take. That’s what I did. Finally, I realized that it was someone checking on me and the baby so I would just say “we’re fine, we’re just going to the bathroom”. I felt like the room calmed down a lot then. I discussed this with my sister-in-law. I told her that I thought it was woman in a dress with an apron. She told me that would have had to be her mother, she always wore an apron. I was usually so sleepy it didn’t bother me much. But I was glad to know that she was checking on her newest grandchild.
This other story really had me perplexed. There wasn’t any other answer other than a ghost so here goes. Whenever we have a garden my sweet, sweet husband is always insistent when it needs to be picked. If you don’t go out and pick it when he says to then he’ll either mow it over or he’ll go pick it and tell you to put it up. So it’s just easier to get out there and do it when he says it has to be done. This one particular time he said that the corn needed to be picked. Right now. I had worked a long day and wasn’t interested in picking the corn. Plus, I had just finished cooking supper and doing the dishes and needed to get the kids their baths and put to bed. It didn’t matter. He wanted that corn picked.
He picked the corn but then I had to shuck it. He put us on the edge of the garden, close to the cow lot so that we could throw the shucks over the fence to the cows. The kids were little at the time so they were outside just playing and running around. But then my youngest daughter, Katie, came up to me and started helping. She was 3 or 4 at the time. She shucked corn like a pro. She barely left any silks on the cob. Here I was struggling with getting the shuck off and she had them off in 2 or 3 pulls. I was amazed. Even Jimmy came over to help and he was amazed. I told him it would have been interesting if she had inherited that talent. But we knew that just didn’t happen.
After we had shucked the corn Jimmy was finishing up and the kids and I went into the kitchen with 5 gallon buckets of corn. I put it in the kitchen sink and ran the water. While it was filling up the sink I was rinsing the corn and putting it into pans to start cutting it off the cob. A couple of times Katie said “what, Mama?” I hadn’t said anything to her. When she asked me for a third time what I had said I went back to her and said “Katie, what do you think I’m saying to you?” She said “I think you’re telling me to watch you so that I can learn how to do this.” No, I hadn’t said anything like that at all. I was amazed.
When I was finishing that up, getting ready to go over to the kitchen table to start cutting the corn off the cobs I glanced out the front door and saw Jimmy carrying two 5 gallon buckets up the hill. It looked as though they were full of something, like corn shucks or feed or something. That surprised me because we had been throwing the shucks over the fence to the cows. We didn’t have anything to be fed up the hill. I went to front door to see where he was headed. He was supposed to help me and I just knew that he was off to do another job.
When I got out on the porch I saw him coming up the hill on the mower. I turned and looked to where I had seen him headed. He stopped when he saw me. I asked him where he had taken those buckets. He looked at me like I was crazy. I asked him if he had just been coming up the hill with two 5 gallon buckets of something. He said “no, I’ve been mowing the corn stalks down in the garden.” I asked him again. He vehemently said “no”. Then he wanted to know why. I told him I must have been going crazy because I just saw him walk up the hill with two 5 gallon buckets of feed or something. He didn’t answer.
Jimmy is built just like his dad, who was also a farmer. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
He joined me in the house and we finished putting the corn up. It was a long time before we talked about that again.