• Like I said: hardscrabble.
  • Began nine hours before dawn.
  • Everyone got meningitis one year.
  • Papa, the pigs died.
  • Pigs, Papa died.
  • You are never done chopping wood.
  • Sometimes you take a break from chopping wood to split logs, but mostly you chop wood.
  • Bi-monthly Comanche attacks.
  • From the plains to the Delta, and up to the Canadian border: every settlement was attacked by Comanche once a fortnight; they were screaming devils, and they’d ride down out of the hills.
  • Even if you lived in a very flat place, the Comanche would still ride down out of the hills.
  • This went on until March of 1931; prior to that, several World Series games were interrupted by Comanche attack.
  • A swimmin’ hole.
  • Back fields.
  • Pile of wood that needs to be chopped.
  • Outhouse. (It is unimaginable how dirty a Pioneer Person’s asshole would have been. They wiped their asses with the Sears-Roebuck catalogue or corncobs, and bathed once a week. The current vogue for eating ass would not have taken off back in pioneer days: it would just be straight-up doody-eating.)
  • One winter, a blizzard ate Mama.
  • You could fish in the lake, but you could not jet-ski in the lake because jets did not exist, let alone jet-skis.
  • Good deal of your time was spent walking behind a donkey.
  • If you were a Pioneer Person on the Great Plains you might live in a sod house, as there were not enough trees to provide lumber.
  • Grass.
  • If you worked hard and saved, then one day you might upgrade to a bush.
  • Grass.
  • How do you wire the electrical in a grass house?
  • Nothing about that is up to code.
  • Think of how shitty the places they left must have been.
  • Why are you not out chopping wood?