This story is from Ann Harlan, submitted as part of our Wisdom From Our Elders collection of self-sufficient tales from yesteryear.
My maternal grandmother and grandfather grew up in Kentucky on farms. They came North during the Industrial Revolution and my grandfather took a job near Detroit driving a bulldozer. This was around the 1930s. My grandmother was a busy mother of seven.
She maintained a garden in her city lot while Papaw worked long hours. When pheasants would come to eat from the garden, she would raise up the window (just a bit) and shoot them from inside the house (because it was illegal to fire a gun in the city limits). Then, in a little while, she would take a basket out to the garden and carefully collect the pheasants and put produce on top so no one would see her.
She was a very creative and durable woman, despite having heart damage from rheumatic fever. As a transplanted Choctaw and Southerner, she coped with the tremendous cultural changes in very creative ways – maintaining her knowledge of good use of the land and its resources.
Photo Credit: Fotolia/David Hughes
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