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in Florida, hauling gravel not making salt to go in the bread. His two brothers and their families were over there too. So Willie said he'd have to work all day on Sunday repairing trucks for Monday morning. He wrote me several times that he was so tired at night after supper and he'd have had his bath until he hardly knew what he was writing and fussed at me for not writing him more often, and I was in the same shape he was in. Tired to death from all the work I had to do for seven of us. We never knew what an electric light was nor a washing machine or dryer or any of those modern things were then. I suppose all of the younger generation has heard how us older women used to have to wash clothes on a washboard, pump and carry water enough to fill a big iron pot which would hold twelve buckets of water. Then fill three No. 3 wash tubs with washing water and to rinse the cloths after they were rubbed on the washboard then rinse thoroughly and wring out by hand and then hang on the line. We would have to go across the field over the fence, and cut and haul the wood in our arms and throw it over the fence, climb back over fence and pick the wood up and carry it to the house, build a fire under the wash pot, boil the cloths and I've told you all the rest of what we had to do. I believe I remember telling farther back in this diary of how much fuss it was.
We used to have what the old folks called hog killing days. Now that was hard work too, but was worth it. The menfolks would go across the river into the swamp and gather up their hogs and drive them out, swim them across the river, drive them home. They'd always have the corn and sweet potatoes gather by then, so they would turn the hogs into the corn patch first and let them get all the corn that the missed when it was gathered. So when they cleaned the corn patch up they'd turn them into the potato patch, then when they had rooted and ate all the taters, they set a day for one family to kill eight or ten big fat hogs. There'd be three and four men some building a fire under the washpot, some bringing water to fill the pot, others knocking the hogs in the head and they had dug a big hole slanting like a gophers hole (house) so a large wooden barrel would fit in it. Then when the water in the pot was hot, a certain temperature they'd dip the hog in the barrel then pull him out on boards and scrape, then do that several times until the hair is all off that the hog is white and clean, then they hung them on a scaffold by the hogs hind feet and pour buckets of cold water over the hogs and scrape and scrape and scrape because if the hog was not scraped thoroughly, it would
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