By Ada Brownell
The rooster was almost as big as I was when he chased me
down the cellar stairs, flogged me beating me with his wings and an attacking
me with his spurs. I thank God that someone heard my cries and rescued me.
Despite that event, I learned a cellar was mighty important
to our family of ten. I was the baby and the “runt of the litter” of eight
children, according to Daddy. People used to ask me after I became an adult why
I was so much smaller than my four sisters. With a grin I said, “By the time I
elbowed through the crowd, the food was gone.”
But that wasn’t true. Even in the days when Daddy only make
one dollar for a twelve-hour day shoveling coal from railroad cars onto trucks,
we had plenty of food to eat. You see, Mama and Daddy knew how to raise
chickens, pigs, beef, and a huge garden, although they only had ten acres, and
much of that food ended up in jars on the cellar shelves.
I learned early it
took work from about everybody to get that food into the cellar. Plant the
seeds. Stick those tiny tomato plants in the ground. Hoe and pull the weeds.
Shell the peas. Snap the beans. Peel tomatoes. Pick the grapes. Pick the
berries. Go to the orchard and pick the cherries, apricots, plums and peaches.
But first somebody has to wash and sterilize the jars, and
often that somebody was me.
Our first cellar was underground, a mound in our backyard. I
don’t think I ever went in it. We didn’t have tornadoes in Colorado. But the
cellar was a good place to stand on so I could get on a horse if I pulled her
up beside it.
When our family moved into our two-story house, the “cellar”
was actually a basement with an outside entrance. We always had shelves and
shelves of canned goods, and Daddy’s potatoes and onions lasted through the
winter when stored down there. He put his carrots and sweet potatoes into pits,
covered with dirt and they’d keep a long time too.
I think of storing food in a cellar as similar to things we
learn, good memories, and scriptures we memorize and put into our heads. What I
put into my brain and recall even years later is an amazing part of God’s
creation. That’s one reason why I’m careful about what I put in my mind. I
don’t want what I put there to be like one rotten potato in the cellar which
can stink up the whole place, or a poisonous spoiled improperly processed jar
of green beans which can kill.
Yet, when the rotten potato or bad green beans are thrown
out, the beauty and the appetizing appeal of a box of fat crispy potatoes, rows
upon rows of red tomatoes, golden peaches, green beans, and lilac grape and
rosy raspberry jellies remains. The food would last and feed our large family
for at least a couple of years, when properly sealed and stored.
For us, the cool cellar made it possible.
My mom’s washing machine also was in the cellar, a furnace with
a auger which fed the coal stored in the basement into the furnace.
Mom separated her laundry on the floor and one day picked up
a fat toad that slipped underneath the dirty clothes. She threw him into the
steaming hot water in the wringer washer and then gasped when she saw him. She
hurried up the steps outside and called to Stuart, the neighbor boy.
Stuart didn’t even protest at the task she wanted him to do.
He reached in, grabbed the toad, and walked away with a happy face. He had a
toad and the quarter Mom gave him to do the job.
What a time we enjoyed with our cellar!
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