The Feedsack Dress

Celebrating books, including The Feedsack Dress

Anyone who thinks books are extinct should go to the Mall in Washington, D.C., September 26, 2009. There 100 or so writers and 120,000 or so readers will take part in the ninth annual National Book Festival.

The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress sponsors the event, and President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama serve as honorary co-chairs. Writers of diverse genres come from all over the country to talk about their books, with readers often overflowing the giant tents set up between 7^th and 14th streets. 

This year The Feedsack Dress is part of the festival. The Missouri Center for the Book selected it as the state’s recommended read. Every state chooses one book. Children (and others) attending the festival pick up a free map, “Discover Great Places Through Reading,” at the Pavilion of the States and go to state booths to receive a stamp or sticker and information on books from that state. On the back of the map is a list of “52 Great Reads About Great Places,” and that list includes my middle-reader novel.

I’ve attended the festival several times, and it’s a great day for those who love books. As usual, the program this year is outstanding (see www.loc.gov/bookfest). Among the writers who will be speaking are Judy Blume, Kate DiCamillo, Jon Scieszka, Lois Lowry, Douglas Brinkley, Sue Monk Kidd, Ken Burns, Michael Connelly, Walter Mosely, James Patterson, S. J. Rozan, Lisa Scottoline, John Grisham, John Irving, Nicholas Sparks, and W. Ralph Eubanks.

If you go to the National Book Festival, please stop by the Missouri booth and pick up a bookmark for The Feedsack Dress. 

—Carolyn Mulford

The last of the fried chicken

My mother stopped frying chicken about this time of year. The chickens we’d raised over the summer were becoming too tough to fry. 

Every spring my parents bought about 150 newly hatched chickens and put them in a brooder house roughly 15x15. Chickens peak on the cuteness scale in their first week or two of life, and their fuzz feels soft as a teddy bear. 

My sisters and I eagerly awaited the chicks, but they require a lot of work. You have to keep them really warm. We used kerosene heaters in our electricity-free brooder house. They required very shallow, narrow water containers so they wouldn’t fall in and drown, and those and the food containers had to cleaned and refilled frequently. 

Chickens have tiny brains even when they grow up. Baby chicks tend to stampede right over each other when alarmed, and our opening the door of the brooder house for the third or fourth time a day would stampede them. Sometimes chicks got smothered. One of our unpleasant jobs on each visit was looking for dead chicks. 

Chicks become less cute and less vulnerable as feathers sprout. That’s fortunate. We raised some to replace our aging laying hens, but many ended up on the table. By mid summer my mother would point out the meal of the day scratching in the dirt by the brooder house or in the barnyard and one of us would catch it. In those days people still talked about chicken every Sunday, but we had fried chicken most July and August days. 

My mother killed the condemned chicken by holding it down on an old stump with one hand and chopping off the head with a hatchet with the other. She’d fling the headless animal away to keep it from throwing blood on her as it thrashed around—the proverbial chicken with its head off. She would have hot water in a big bucket at hand, and when the chicken stopped moving, she would grab it by the legs and dunk it until it was soaked. That made it easier to pluck the feathers, a smelly and tedious job we all hated. 

By fall the survivors lived in the hen house. During the winter an older hen who didn’t lay regularly came to our table about twice a month as roasted or boiled chicken. 

We named most of our other animals and gave them a bit of the affection you give to pets, but we never named the baby chicks. You keep an emotional distance from your dinner. 

 —Carolyn Mulford

Launching an anthology

We have a long tradition in this country of aspiring and established writers banding together to support and educate each other. Another part of that tradition is publishing a literary journal of those writers’ work.

Each year the Columbia Chapter of the Missouri Writers’ Guild publishes an anthology of poetry, short stories, and nonfiction. More than half the group’s members submitted entries for Well Versed: Literary Works 2009, and local writers and writing teachers read the anonymous entries to determine whose work met the standards for publication. 

The judges selected more than 60 submissions, enough to produce a 180-page book. The chapter printed it by uploading a PDF to CreateSpace, an Amazon affiliate, and the book is available at Amazon.com ($10 plus shipping), Columbia Books, CCMWG events, and a few writers’ conferences.

To launch Well Versed, CCMWG and Columbia Books are holding a book signing 2-4 p.m., Sunday, September 13, 2009, at 1907 Gordon Street, Columbia, Missouri. Contributors will read selections at 2:30.

Contributors also are reading and signing at the Longworth Literary Festival, Mel Aytes Education Center, Metropolitan Community College-Longworth, Lee’s Summit, Missouri, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., October 1-2.

The contributions vary in form, content, and style, offering something for almost any reader. I can’t review the book as I’m biased. I was the managing editor.

—Carolyn Mulford

Milking the cows in the 1940s

Cows dictated almost all Missouri farm families’ schedule in the 1940s. You couldn’t go anywhere until finishing the morning milking and you had to be back in time for the evening milking.

Before electricity came to our farm, we usually milked eight or nine Jerseys and Guernsey by hand. My parents sat on stools and squirted the milk into a bucket. They finished the morning milking before breakfast, and before dawn much of the year. Kerosene lanterns hung provided the light. You had to be careful because the loft above the cows contained hay, and any spark could set the whole barn on fire.

My sisters and I helped only with the evening milking, doing the most in the summer when my father worked late in the fields. We drove the cows from the pasture to our red barn, put ground grain in the wood box in front of each cow’s stanchion (boards that closed on her neck and kept her in place), pumped water from a well into a tank, and occasionally helped clean out the manure trench.

Electricity let us double and then triple the size of the herd because the milking units, which attached to all four teats at once, increased the speed and ease of milking. My jobs didn’t change much, except that we didn’t have room to put all the cows in the barn to milk at once. Most were eager for their turn, both to have their bulging udders emptied and to get their feed. Some of them knew their names. One of us would open the barn door and holler the name of the next cow and she would hurry in and to her place.

Naming thirty cows gets to be a challenge. If my father bought a cow from a farmer, he named it after the farmer’s wife. If a heifer calf was born to one of our cows, she might get her own name or be named after her mother. At one time we had Spot, Spot 1, Spot 2, Spot 3, Spot 4, Spot 5, and Spot 6. They all bore similar markings, and they were all more nervous than our other cows. A couple of them (4 and 5?) were hard to tell apart. 

Most dairy cows, particularly Jerseys, appear serene, and they gaze at you with beautiful brown eyes. Nice as they are, the necessity of giving them priority twice a day year after year is enough to drive you off the farm.

 

—Carolyn Mulford