Back in Time

This is my chicken-killing stump.
When I was about 13 we bought a little farm in West Virginia. It had a little droopy house, a pond, a well, a chicken coop, a shed, 9.53 acres wooded, a grape arbor, a jasmine bush, wild horseradish, and a big old apple tree. Oh yeah, and wild elderberry shrubs everywhere.
My mother spent all our money on purchasing the farm, and a few tools that we would need, and then we were broke. That's it. Make it or break it. We got four nanny goats, about 50 chickens, and a dozen rabbits.
There was no man around. Just my mother, myself, and my little brother. We had to cut our own wood, kill our own meat, and grow or gather our own food. It was a matter of pride to us. If somebody shot a couple of squirrels, we got to eat. I learned about wild foods. We ate everything that the books said was edible. We ate cattail shoots, mushrooms, ramps, elderberries. I discovered sassafras root for tea. My mother would look up different herbs to tell what they were good for, and we wasted nothing.
That first year, we didn't have the money to pay anyone to disc our field, so we were making do. The three of us hanging on the back of a huge rear-tine-tiller trying to bust up the clods. A friendly farmer from up the road went and got his disc and drove up, we were so busy we didn't even hear him. I'm sure he was laughing at the three of us being dragged around by that monster-tiller. He was kind enough to disc our field for us for nothing. We started all our seeds indoors. Every inch of the house had seedlings. We had brussel sprouts, beans, tomatoes, peppers (of every kind), cabbage, okra, - you name it, I'm sure we planted it. We cut strips of plastic to lay down between the rows to keep the weeding down somewhat.
I milked the goats twice a day and measured, strained and recorded production. My brother was given the job of making nesting boxes for the hens. I culled the roosters as soon as they started fighting. I used a bail of hay every two days in the winter. I saved the strings that they were baled with.
When spring came around, we put all the seedlings in the ground. I birthed the new kids (baby goats), and hatched the new biddies. Which brought the count up to: 9 goats, 152 chickens, and 7 rabbits.
All throughout that first summer, my new kids followed me around like puppies. I killed two chickens a day – one for the pot and one for the freezer, weeded the garden, did the laundry in a wringer washer and hung it on a line to dry, and cooked supper. My Mother ran the chainsaw. It takes 9 ½ cords of wood and two tons of lumpy coal to make it through the winter. She cut all that. My brother had to haul it, split it by hand, and stack it. He also had to haul the water while I milked.
Back to the stump. Every day I would put two pieces of baling twine in my back pocket and pick out two chickens. I would pick a mean rooster if I had one, otherwise I would pick the hens with pink around their eyes (means they eat eggs) or small combs (bad layers), or just the bullies who picked on my favorite hens. I would loop the twine around their feet and take them to the stump. I chopped their heads off, and hooked the twine on a nail protruding from the stump. Let them bleed on the rock below while I waited for the water to boil.
My husband found the chicken killing stump fascinating, so he made me pose beside it while he took the picture.