Memories of life

Nothing beats a good back strap & gravy. :yum: :yum: :yum: :yum:

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This is a picture of me in 1958, when I was 8 years old. That’s my first garden, green beans in a cement planter. We harvested them and had them for dinner one evening. As it turned out, green beans were the first produce item I picked for money. I was 14.

That’s a built in brick barbecue behind the planter. The room in the background was my bedroom. I don’t recall us ever using that barbecue, but I was two years old when my folks bought that three bedroom (with a two car garage, and a large front and back yard). It was well under $5,000. It had an incinerator too! I was always fascinated by the smell of burning mostly paper trash. As an adult when I lived in the country and had a burn barrel, that odor always took me back to my childhood. It still does, but living in a densely populated city, one just isn’t exposed to that kind of stuff.

That’s me again, this time in 1954, standing next to the incinerator. Looks like it was trash burning day. You can only see the incinerator’s top. The incinerator itself is hiding behind the cardboard boxes. It was cement or concrete, the firebox lined with fire brick. Like a residential fireplace, it had a metal clean-out door under the fire box.

I don’t remember that shirt or shorts. I do, however, appear to have a particularly dumbfounded look on my face! HA! I believe that’s excelsior packing material, not paper, falling out of those boxes. You don’t see much excelsior packing material any longer.

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excelsior packing material

They still make and use it for nesting material for chickens.

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Thank you, @Oldjoints, for pointing that out! Totally makes sense! :+1:

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I’m guessing that’s a tiny piece of excelsior. Probably for tiny chickens! lol (1)

Thank you for posting that picture, @CocoaCoir!

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