Mornings in the country would normally start with bacon, eggs and toast. Mom cooked the bacon crispy, then she would cook the eggs in the bacon grease. She never turned eggs over, she would baste them in the hot bacon grease till the top was slightly cooked but the yellow was still runny. We didn’t have a toaster. The toast was made on the broiler at the bottom of the stove. She would line 8 pieces of bread up in two rows. Cook one side till it was brown then flip the bread over to cook the other side.
We would eat our eggs, wrap the bacon in the toast and use it to soak up the runny yellow left on the plate. It was normal to have egg on your face. We proudly compared white mustaches as we drank milk at every meal.
Once breakfast was over we did our chores. Fed the chickens and whatever animals we had at the time. Sometimes rabbits, pigs, the cow whatever. We were also garden slaves but I don’t want to talk about that right now because I am in a pretty good mood and I don’t want to mess that up. Once chores were done we were on our own.
There were no video games, only 2 channels on TV and most weekdays there were only boring soap operas on anyway. We didn’t look down at a phone all day. As a matter of fact there was only one phone in the family and you couldn’t use that if one of the neighbors was using the party line. (You may need to google what a party line was} My brothers, cousins, neighbors and I found the most entertainment by inventing games to play.
We had a lot of peeing games, which made sense cause the equipment was always handy. We would see who could pee the farthest. Who could pee the longest, little brother Dave would almost always win that one and I don’t know how he did it. He was the smallest! We would all have our eyes crossed straining for just a little more and he would be humming away. (Full of piss and vinegar I suppose.)
If we felt artistic we would pee our name in the dirt. We might pick out a particular low hanging leaf on a tree and see who could hit that. Oh, and we did like to pee on bugs. We could knock an ant off a tree from 5 feet. I will say we all had good pee-shooters.
I will never forget the “Who can pee the highest” game. We only played that once. Phil, Dave and I, along with our cousin Butch and neighbor Dave Lytle were playing in the barn. We decided we would see who could pee the highest. We stood in a circle, which was a dangerous position for a peeing game and we all shot for the sky! Butch won and lost at the same time because he pointed his peewee up and peed in his own face! Reminding him of that at a family reunion is always fun.