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Birthday: November 20
Location:
VERSAILLES, Kentucky
United States
VERSAILLES, Kentucky
United States
AbigailThomasMusings: Smokehouses and Curing
From my blog, http://queenofpastures.wordpress.com/
Some Woodford County landmarks landed in a prominent spot in the May 30 issue of The (Lexington) Herald-Leader.
The feature included several photographs, such as of a bicyclist on Pisgah Pike, Pisgah Presbyterian Church, and a springhouse on Pisgah Pike.
Springhouses offer magnetic appeal. It’s easy for the mind to wander about their age and about the history to which they have been a witness. And, they’re as beautiful as they are utilitarian.
As far as rural architecture goes, I find smokehouses equally intriguing.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was born in 1901, and I believe that close-but-not-quite perception marked his outlook on life.
“Almost born in the year of a new century,” he told me more than once.
Almost became an oft-used descriptor with him. He had almost been born on turf now known as the Great Smoky Mountains, just one county to the west. He had been almost old enough to fight in World War I and almost young enough to fight in the Second World War.
He almost finished an elementary education, but quit school to help on the family farm when his father passed away.
He almost made his living as a butcher, until fate intervened and he found himself working for a smelting plant owned by ALCOA Aluminum Co.
He almost represented plant workers at union-company labor talks in Washington, D.C. Fellow union workers rooted for him to represent them in collective bargaining negotiations; he declined because of his self-consciousness over his inability to read, as the only thing he could write was his name.
One thing is clear, however. He and my grandmother did not live almost in the country – suburbs, in today’s terms. They lived in city limits in a one-story house with white clapboard and black shingles that looked like the next and the next and the next, within walking distance of the aluminum plant.
My grandfather must have missed the farm he remembered from his boyhood, though. I remember riding with him to what he called “the hollers,” passing up the opportunity to buy “aigs” at the local A&P, opting instead for brown ones from a family who must have lived closer to the mountains, judging by the car sickness I felt from a road that undulated as much from left to right as it did from up to down.
Since he didn’t live in the country, my grandfather created the next best thing when he converted a shed out back into a smokehouse.
My first memory of seeing the hams he cured came about when I was in grade school.
One summer day, he unfastened the padlock, and swung the door inside. When we stepped up and into the smokehouse, the linoleum floor crackled. The room was dark, so I rubbed my eyes, hoping to speed up my ability to see. Once my eyes adjusted, I remember thinking the floor looked like a map of east Tennessee, with mountains and valleys of its own, formed by clashes between heat and cold and a leaky roof.
The walls of the smokehouse were wooden and unpainted, with nuts, bolts, screws and nails dropped into Mason jars that lined a rustic shelf.
. My eyes continued to travel upward, until they locked on a calendar I suspected I shouldn’t be seeing. The woman pictured looked as confident as Nancy Sinatra did on the cover of that year’s super-selling album, “Sugar,” in which Nancy wore nothing but a Pepto-Bismol pink bikini and a come hither expression. The woman on the calendar was dressed in just half of what Nancy Sinatra had worn for her photo session, though.
Embarrassed, I moved my eyes up to a rafter from which three or four hams hung. My grandfather gave them each a twirl, moving left to right, until they swung like punching bags.
“They’re almost ready,” he declared, seemingly oblivious that dozens of flies had left their pork roost and were looking for new places to land.
“Ewwww,” I said, swatting at them.
There wasn’t much more to say. I’d pestered him to let me see the smokehouse, and now that I’d seen it, my impression was that it as a spot where he could almost hide. He could join the company of the hams, look at his calendar, maybe drink one of the beers he kept in the fridge – the stash he kept to help his kidneys, he said.
In the smokehouse, he could almost shut out the sound of the aluminum plant’s whistle that signaled the end of one labor shift, the beginning of the next. He could almost set aside the thought of another day at the plant beginning again in just a few hours. He could almost imagine he was already retired, hanging out with a fishing buddy on Lake Norris.
He asked if I was ready to leave. My nod told him all he needed to know.
Not too long afterward, I heard that my grandfather invited Preacher to the smokehouse to see his calendar. I can’t imagine why he thought it was appropriate to point out that calendar to a minister, of all people, and no telling what the man of the cloth thought, but I have been told that soon after that incident, my grandfather was “saved.”
He gave up the beer and the calendars, but never the hams.
Smokehouses are for curing, it is said.
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