A New Bucket for Beauty Maybe some folks don t realize what hard times really are
....© by D. Grant DeMan
Lying forlorn in the back yard sits an old gray bucket, whispering long-gone tales of hard times endured and a family s conquering spirit. Yes, and somehow I hear it ring out lusty songs of youthful yeoman ardor, when brim-filled with bubbling milk, it served us well before we came to Vancouver Island.
Sixty years ago we led Beauty home. "What a beautiful cow, Momma!" Marg and I danced around feeling the warm flesh of that magnificent cream-faced Jersey-Guernsey. We rubbed her pink nose and fed her cantaloupe, proud of having saved egg money for months to raise her five dollar purchase price.
"Now we ll have fresh milk every day, and butter, and butter-milk, as well as cream for our porridge." Dad beamed. The angels of heaven had indeed endowed us with an unsurpassed gift. Unloading supplies from the back of the Model A pickup, he brought forth the bucket, bright as chrome in the sunlight, awakening awe in our faces. For a spell it sat it in the yard displayed like a museum piece while neighbors and friends came to gaze upon its modernity, an unusual round bottom squaring toward the top.
"Well, just looka that, willya, Pearl. One of them new ones they just got in. Set ya back a lot, Joe?"
"It cost him two dollars." Mom interjected, somewhat peeved that Dad could be so extravagant.
"OOoee! I never before seen a two buck bucket. Jus look at the shine! Mus' be that aluminum or somethin' like it. Nope, its heavy - galvanize, I reckon. You ll be milkin in style with that there pail! That ain t goin' down no well, nosiree!"
Each day visitors lauded reverence upon our new-fashioned acquisition, which we were careful to clean after milking Beauty, herself seeming proud of the splendor beneath her teats, so sweet came her pinkish cantaloupe-flavored milk. To Marg and I, who had never before seen anything new, that bucket became a kind of lump-in-the-throat monumental joy.
We had arrived from the north with nothing but a load of old furniture, broken in a truck rollover, a cat and three dollars and eighty-five cents. Now we share-cropped vegetables, fruit and melons. We raised chickens incubated in a peach crate of wrappers on top of the warming oven, enjoyed porridge ground from chickenfeed, and cornbread aplenty. The abundance: Shoes for winter, venison and bacon, bologna on Saturday, and crusty fried chicken for company dinners. We even got us a gasoline lamp, pride of the neighborhood, and brighter than coal oil. The bedbugs had diminished and we laid a sawdust and paste floor in the front room where hung a wash-tub for bathing in thrice-used water Daddy hauled from the flume on Saturday nights, a tub also used for laundry and brewing root beer. Our luck was improving: Haul out the banjo, mouth organ and ukulele: "Well, it ain't gonna rain no more no more, it ain't a-gonna rain no more....."
At bedtime Momma read stories of Snow White, Rose Red, and aristocrats dwelling in pinnacled castles, sailing the seas in great ships, even flying their own airplanes. We somehow did not know we were poor as dust, though we figured we sure were not wealthy. Wealthy was when we came to Victoria, and got to take in movies, have a telephone right in our home, wear shoes in the summer, and eat store-bought candy. Read books! Oh how wonderful was our first ride on streetcar Number Nine!
Just the other day I read one more account of the alarming widening gap between the rich and the poor, which gave me pause. For the disadvantaged I know live in a heated abode, use a refrigerator, enjoy running water with a bathroom and flushing commode, watch colored television, read any books they wish, and eat extremely well - I know because I cooked for many during the past ten years - are endowed with a health plan, welfare or handicapped pension, and government services of all kinds. The DeMan family would think they d arrived in heaven to have a couple of these benefits in return for their labors.
Yep, we were grateful for a cow and a milk pail. Those and a pair of surviving dry-land crops wrung from borrowed land with back-breaking labor under sizzling, tar-melting sun, busier than Beauty's tail in fly season. One wonders by any reckoning how this gap between us and the rich is widening. The rich can only live in so many castles, trip to a limited number of places, and good for them! Certainly no match for the memory of Beauty, in her contentment, pouring forth cantaloupe-flavored milk, churning warm in our hallowed bucket, still well-used, lying six decades later under a backyard spruce.
Or of Joe and Pearl, who made hard times feel natural. It seems, some folks know better how to appreciate the finer moments of life. As Mom used to recite: "Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better." When you re really poor, a little faith, a fine cow and a good bucket goes a long way.
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