Granny's Pantry # 34: Where the Worms Are

Sometimes it's the smallest details that come unexpectedly to mind that highlight just how significant certain people or places or things are...or have been...in a life. The otherwise insignificant details can serve to anchor snatches of memories. Such it was on my recent visit to High Rock when I remembered where the worms came from.

Life was largely self-sufficient on the farm at High Rock for Granny and Granddaddy Cole. While they didn't produce everything needed to subsist and enrich their lives, a great deal of it they did. Vegetables from the garden and the fields, pork, milk and butter, fruit for the pies, wine and grape juice, eggs, chickens, turkeys, fish...they all came from the farm. Grain went to the mill and came back flour or animal feed. While some clothes came from town, Granny fashioned some from feed sacks or knitted others. She made quilts and rugs from scraps of cloth. Granddaddy could make furniture. 

The chicken house was located in the yard behind the High Rock house. It was made of wood and wire and was a considerable sized building. The chicken feed spread into the feeders or on the floor sifted, over the years, through the cracks in the floor and walls of the chicken house onto the ground around it. There it mixed with red clay and other soil to nurture another type of crop around and under the chicken house.

When it was time to go fishing, there was never a need to "go buy bait." There was only a need to harvest the bait that was already there. All it took was a shovel or hoe, a can with dirt in it and some muscle to dig. The process was a lot like digging for treasure, but of the long, slim, wiggly kind...earthworms. 

A tin can, some worms from behind the chicken house and a cane pole was all it took. And a pond, like the one at the Cow Palace.

And he [Jesus] said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

(Matthew 4:19)