Tastes Like Chicken

I remember when I was a kid most of the other families were well off enough to have houses. Not us. We lived in a big twelve by twelve foot army tent made out of that green canvas. You know? My dad built a big wooden foundation so we weren't sleeping directly on the ground and so that the table and chairs, which we only had two chairs, would sit level. It was somewhat convenient though. Whenever the river would rise or start to flood, other people would lose their houses, or at least take a lot of damage and have to clean them back up afterwards. It was a real mess. Not us, we would just pick up our house and walk up the bank a ways and stake it down again. It was one upside I guess. My dad had a way about always looking at the positive. That's probably one of the reasons he didn't have an enemy in the world, except for FDR. He never got too upset about things. 

But anyway, where was I. Living next to the river had its advantages too. We ate a lot of bread, not a lot of meat. Usually every Sunday my dad would try to get some steak or chicken or deer or something extra. For snacks me and my older brother, I was the second oldest of five but it wasn't five yet, would go out and catch frogs. We would cut off there legs and have frog legs. They tasted just like chicken, I'll tell you what, they were actually pretty good, a lot better than squirrels. That was probably because we didn't kill the squirrels ourselves usually. We just found them dead along side the road or something. Those frog legs were fun to cook too. Mom didn't like it much though. Leonard [his older brother] and I would put them in the pan with the lid on and the legs would start to jump after a while. They would almost knock the lid off the pan if we weren't careful.

Occasionally, when Dad couldn't get a hold of anything special, we would go get it ourselves. We would row across to the other side of the Mississippi and get clams and crawdads or whatever we could find over there. A neighbor of ours had a boat, but it had holes in it so why your great grandpa Jake would row across the river, your uncle Leonard and I would shovel the water out of the boat with a bucket. Once we made it to the other side where the clams were, I would get into the water where the current wasn't too strong. It was usually around eight feet deep or so, and I wasn't a good swimmer. Well, I take that back. I was a good swimmer under the water, I just couldn't tread water very well. Your uncle was sissy and made his little brother do it why he stayed in the boat and shoveled out water. I would swim down to the bottom, dig around for some clams, and then push off back to the surface. Dad would put the bailing bucket on the end of one of the oars and reach out to me for me to put the clams in and get a bit of a breather. Then I would swim back down and get some more while they gathered in the clams and put them in a sack while Leonard caught up on his bailing because we only had one bucket. It was scary sometimes, and quite tiring, but the good food was worth it I guess.