Trying To Walk In Beauty

It’s early in the morning and my mom is in the kitchen part of our house and she tells me to go get the bacon. I run outside and start crawling up the tree that sat near our house. My feet already knows where to step because I have crawled up this tree many times before. My hands already knows which branch to grab to pull me up higher. I get to the the top of the tree and there is a metal milk crate tied and fastened to some of the branches of the tree. I put my free hand into the crate and pull out the Blue Bird flour bag and I start crawling back down. As soon as I get down the tree, I run back inside our one-roomed center blocked house that we moved into a few years ago. My mom has her pan on the stove as she waits for me. I give her the flour bag and she unties the knot and pulls the slab of bacon. She cuts off only about a couple inches of bacon and she puts the rest back into the flour bag. She hands the flour bag back to me and tells me to take it back to the crate in the tree. I take the bag and run back outside, crawl back up the tree once again and drop the bag of flour back into the milk crate before crawling back down. Very little do I know at the time, this was the way we refrigerated our meat back then. Putting it high up in the tree so it remained cool and so other animals wouldn’t get to the meat. As a kid, all I saw was an opportunity to crawl up a tree to help my mother out with her cooking. A few years later, when I would run away from boarding schools, one of the things I worried about was that there was no one home to help my mom get the meat from on top of the tree.