Cat Catastrophe & Baptizing Chickens

One of our new amusements was to catch big tobacco worms and tie thread to the horn on their tail. About four worms were a good team. Then we would fasten them to a small match box and add little pebbles until they could hardly pull the box. Oh, this was so much fun! We just rolled and laughed to see the worms work so hard.

To add to the fun, we decided to tie the cat to a shoe box and load it with tobacco sacks full of sand. It was easy to collect tobacco sacks, small cloth bags with drawstring tops. Everyone who smoked then "rolled their own" from this sack-type tobacco.

But we did not know that cats do not like to work. The cat went wild and ran under the house as far as he could with the load still fastened behind. We knew we were in trouble then, as we had been taught never to let an animal loose with a rope or leash because they could get caught in brush or a fence and hang themselves. So that game was over fast.

We found other diversions.

My mamma kept rain barrels under the house drains to collect rainwater since we were always short on water. When the hens got in the setting stage to stay on the nest for hatching the young, sometimes there were too many setters and not enough layers. So we were allowed to "baptize" them in the rain barrel, dunking them as many times as it took to break them from setting.

That was real fun then, but seems cruel now as I look back on it.