Yard Chicken

Here we are back in South Carolina again.  That’s me upfront and brother Steve right behind me.  He looks about 3 so maybe I am about 5 or so.

 

clothesline

 

As you can see there in the back ground we had one of those newfangled labor saving devices called a clothes line.  This is no store bought clothes line but one constructed in our own yard out of one pole of wood with another pole of wood propping it up.  Wet clothes and sheets can be quite heavy.

We had no so-called dryer like people have now.  But we did have a washing machine that sat right outside the kitchen.  It had an agitator.  You put the clothes in the machine and it agitated the clothes.  On the top, it had a wringer; that was for wringing some of the water out of the clothes and once you had done that you hung them on the clothes line and used the sun as a dryer.  I think the washer was called a wringer washer, because it had a wringer up on top.

If you look to the right and below the white stuff on the clothes line you will see on the ground a real, live (though now long dead) chicken walking around like it had a right to be there or something. 

wringerwasherToday I suppose that chicken would be called a free range chicken, because as you can see it was roaming about freely in an unconstrained manner.  Us, we called them chickens “good eating.”  I do have to say those yard chickens were pretty scrawny; and when you cooked them up there was not much to them at all compared to the fat, chemically fed, chickens you can buy today that have wing bones as big as the drumstick of those yard chickens.  Still the chickens of yesteryear tasted like chickens; the chickens of today don’t taste like much of anything unless you fix them up with stuff before cooking them.

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