Pig and a Blanket

That's my mom on the left :)

This recent cold snap had me thinking about my mom and my resolution to learn one new thing about her every time I called.  "I wonder how she kept warm in a winter like this?" I thought....and so, I found out.
Coal.  A coal burning stove heated the house room - one room - where they all gathered and lived all winter.  Her mom would put a quilt down by the stove and they stayed there all day, coloring or doing homework...in that one warm spot.
For fifteen dollars her dad would buy one ton of coal.  One TON.  It was usually enough to last all winter but some winters were tougher than others and that's when the whole family would make their way to Mud Cut Curve.  That's where the coal train would take a curve and, if they were lucky and the train took it fast enough, coal would fall off the top and land by the tracks.  Each kid was given a sack and they filled it with whatever coal they could find along the tracks.  "It was heavy!" she said of this chore.  It was cold out - and because they had no gloves or mittens, their mom would put their dad's work socks over their little hands.  At night, their mom took a brick, heated it in the stove, wrapped it up and put it in their beds to keep them warm.  "We'd have so many quilts on top of us, we couldn't move," she said.
"Once I got up in the night to get a drink from the water bucket but it was so cold the dipper had frozen into the water - it was all ice," she said.  I was about to suggest that she should've just gone to the sink but then I remembered...no indoor plumbing.  (We're so spoiled, rich, blessed.)

"I was in charge of keeping the coal bucket full," she informed me.  "I'd take my bucket out to the coal pile to fill it but I had to be careful because of the rooster.""What?  A rooster?  Please. Continue," I begged. "We had a banty rooster," she explained.  "We had no underpinning to the house so it would stay up under the porch. Every time I went to the coal pile, it chased me and attacked my legs.  I spilled half the bucket getting back into the house."

"Mom," I say...."this is heartbreaking.  How did you survive your childhood?"

"We were fine.  We were never sick.  We didn't know we were poor.  We had a hog in our closet."

Hold it right there.  

My mom had a pig in her closet.  I had to pause and let that sink in.

Not a pet pig and not a regular closet.  It's the tiny room where they hung up their salted meat for the winter.  Can you imagine having a pig hanging on a meat hook in your pantry?  And just slicing off whatever you needed, whenever you needed it?  Imagine the endless bacon.

"So you had hogs and chickens? Mom, your dad worked for the railroad but it sounds like he was a farmer," I say.

"Everyone had to have those things, and a garden too, just to live," she said.  "My earliest memory was there in that house on the front porch. My legs were dangling over the side and I was swinging them back and forth watching my daddy fix the plow."

"No," she said again.  "We didn't know we were poor."

And maybe, on second thought, they weren't.