The Family Table
(Continued from previous post)
I learned only a couple years ago that my dear friends from North Carolina were one of those families that struggled to put food on the table. My dear, departed friend Bill would sit at the head of the table with an empty plate as his children were served and ate their fill. When they were done he would scrape each plate’s leftovers onto his own plate, and that would be his dinner. It wasn’t until they were grown that his children realized why their father did that. They simply did not have enough food, and he wanted to make sure they were well fed first before he would take anything to eat.
That surely helps to explain his somewhat dramatic response one day many years ago, when the mule (the one he plowed his fields with) got into his garden one time too many and was eating the ears of corn. Enraged, Bill leapt over the fence, hauled back his powerful right arm and lambasted that mule right between the eyes, sending the beast to its knees.
That corn was meant for the family table.
Tags: mule, donkey, bill, breeze, north carolina, corn, table, dinner, meal, family, hunger, starve, scrape, leftovers, nourishment, nutrition, fed, struggle, america