This is Marideth Sisco for These Ozarks Hills. And this has been the oddest August so far. There’s been so much rain that everybody’s garden is still alive. What a thing. In the Ozarks, that’s a very big deal. The Ozarks is special and has been for a long time for a lot of reasons: its beauty, its history, its unique culture.
But the Ozarks has held its character as the westward flow of immigrants passed it by, chiefly because nobody wanted it.
It was too rocky, too full of ticks and chiggers. Too hard. And the rain often stopped in June, and didn’t come back until October. So only the toughest, meanest, most doggedly determined sought it out at all and then dug in their heels. Some actually relished the difficulties. Others had nowhere else to go.
I talk about old times here because I’m old, and I remember quite a few decades back. Of course memories will tend to consist mainly of just the best parts. So I am likely to tell not just how it was, but how I remember it. You’ve heard these stories before. They describe a life that ignored, when possible, world events and passing fashions. They talk of the Great Depression, but they do so mostly in terms of what remained the same, rather than what was different. There was no money, they said. Just like always. And they say, we had a garden until July, then it just burned up.
They don't talk about going hungry, because they remember when there was no work to be had, and the only meat was if Papa shot a squirrel. Papa’s aim was crucial in winter when food and bullets were scarce and they’d not been able to pry from the rocky soil enough to hold them through the winter. If he was successful, they'd have squirrel with gravy and biscuits. Or, if not, just gravy. Or just biscuits. By the time the Depression hit, all the bigger game was gone, hunted out by too many hungry people in a land too spare to support large populations. No deer, no bear, no turkey. Just squirrels, a few rabbits, a few quail.
But if you could make a garden that would produce food out of rocks, you could make it through. If not, well, there was the poor house. Or you just starved. Many small grocers, including my relatives, went almost broke trying to keep other people from starving. It was a lesson you never forgot and you never got over.
My two aunts, Neva and Juanita Gentry, opened a little grocery store with the insurance money Neva got when her husband was killed in an automobile accident. Because Neva was frail and Juanita would be doing most of the work, their aunt Laura loaned Juanita money enough to become co-owner. It was the mid-1930s, and they barely made enough to keep the store stocked with essentials. Beans, cornmeal, flour. Coffee, sugar, tobacco. A barrel of crackers, A wheel of cheese, a jowl of bacon. Bologna. Some feed for livestock and a few tools. Wagon bolts; nails. I asked them later why they chose the grocery business when people hardly had any way to buy groceries. “We never thought we’d make any money,” they said. “We just thought whatever happened, we’d at least be able to eat.”
Hard times leave their mark, even if you don’t go hungry. Because you’ll see its effects in your neighbors faces, and you’ll not have enough to give enough. You’ll struggle to give anything. You’ll just do what you can.
I can't count the times at my Aunt Juanita’s house and removed the two back rows of canned goods from her cabinets and took them home with me. I started doing that after something exploded back in there one day. No telling how long it had been there. But she hoarded food. She didn't feel safe unless there was plenty to feed her, and her family, and your family and whoever might knock at the door. After living through those times, her cupboards were never going to be bare again, by God.
She would speak of her friend, Josie, who was married at 14 to a man much older. A man we would today call a “little person,” He had been a circus clown and was passing through Butterfield on a train when he noticed the station agent was also a dwarf, meaning Butterfield might be a safe place to live in days when the noticeably unusual often found acceptance hard. Here, he was not all that unusual. He stayed, bought a building and opened a store that sold notions and dry goods. He decided he needed a wife, and went looking for one. He found a family who had way too many children and nearly nothing to feed them, and offered them a 20-lb. sack of flour, in exchange for their oldest daughter. Whether it was gaining 20 pounds of flour or losing one of those hungry mouths, they accepted. I don't know the details of the arrangement or what Josie thought of it. But I know she wasn't hungry anymore.
Only two things kept that little town alive through hard times that started way before the Depression and lasted well into the 1960s.
One was the strawberry associations that could ship fruit by rail for every farmer able to grow strawberries in rocks. My Uncle Gus said, “It was the year’s first source of cash money. That was important after a cornbread winter.”
The other was that every single household grew a garden. Seeds were saved, stored and passed down among families or neighbors. Livestock manure was hoarded and spread like gold on gardens and fields. And when the rain stopped, somewhere in late June or July, plants were watered by hand with bucket and dipper, to eke out just a few more tomatoes, a few more beans – a little more of anything that might help you make it through another cornbread winter.
Gardens today are an adventure in tastes and recipe ingredients. Certainly they still ease the strain on the pocketbook, and let us choose the varieties we like and the ones we can’t find in local markets, and they also let us grow safer as well as tastier and more nutritious food.
But when hard times come, and you’re living in a land where the garden patch is a rock pile, having the savvy and the seeds and the knowledge of generations passed down can make a large, clear difference in the kind of life one can attain and maintain. Life, they say, began in a garden. And it’s where I go to refill body and soul, and I grow a little extra, to share in uncertain times.