Dressing Chickens; Canning Tomatoes

It's that time of year - August - the end of summer, the beginning of a new school year. As a kid, for me it also meant helping Mom do the canning of the vegetables from the garden so we would have something to eat during the winter. I didn't like picking, tipping and snapping green beans. I hated husking, de-silking and cutting the sweet corn off the cob. It was such a sticky mess. We always set up a table out in the yard. The flies just loved us!
The one thing I didn't mind was canning tomatoes. Mom would put the blue granite cooker full of water on the stove to boil before we went out to pick the 'maters. Often Dad would go to Corning to pick up his Mom to help us. Old newspapers would be spread on the table. Three dishpans would be set around. Knives would be sharpened, ready at each station. The boiling water would be poured over the buckets of tomatoes to 'scald' them. Ready, set, start....
Oops! I left out preparing the canning jars. Ugh! Another job I hated; washing all those quart jars. Each jar was checked for nicks on the lip which would prevent the jar from sealing, or cracks which could cause the jar to explode in the pressure cooker. It always seemed Mom would find those blemishes after I had already washed them which meant I had to wash more!
We would take a pan of tomatoes, set a bunch of jars in front of our pans and begin taking the skins off and quartering the tomatoes. Scalding helped the skins slip right off. See why I didn't mind canning tomatoes? It was easy. Soon we would have dozens of jars lined up ready to can. Having Grandma Lynam there not only made the job go faster, it was always more fun. Sometimes I would just listen to them talk about grown-up stuff. But Grandma was good about asking me questions and getting me involved in the talk, too, which made me feel grown up.
Dressing chickens was another end of summer job. Any roosters we hadn't already eaten during the summer were killed, dressed and frozen. A few might be allowed to live longer to get bigger for roast chicken; mostly we liked them for fried chicken.
Again, Grandma Lynam often came out to the farm to help out. Mom would kill four to twelve roosters at a time by wringing their necks. When I was really little, my sister and I would watch the headless chickens bounce around the yard until they died. There was nothing worse than being flopped by a bloody, headless chicken.
Mom dipped the birds in scalding water then handed them to us to begin plucking; another job I disliked. Not only was it smelly, the feathers stuck all over me. We carried our buckets of plucked chickens back to the house where Mom singed each one over the stove burner. Singing burned off the remaining hair-like feathers.
Again, the knives were sharpened and ready at each dish pan station. When I first began helping, I could only scrape the pin feathers and cut off the wings and legs. Eventually I learned to cut them open and take out the tricky insides; even how to cut open and clean the gizzards.
I was very proud of the fact that I could dress and cut up a chicken by myself when I was only ten years old! It's surprising I didn't become a surgeon!