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TI: But growing up, when you're sort of an adolescent, like eleven, twelve, thirteen, what were some of the chores that you had to do? You said you always were working. Tell me what would that look like.

CH: Okay. In an orchard, there's always spring and summer and fall. The trees always have to be always like... okay. In the winter, in the late fall and winter, where my dad pruned those trees, and then when the trees are pruned, they drop all the limbs on the ground, so we have to go pick those all up and then tie them up. And that's in the fall, too. Well, anyway, it's damp, it's cold, and so we built a fire and burned those up. not a big fire, just a little small fire, we'd burn 'em up. and then that's in the winter months, there wasn't anything going on until spring. Then now the spring, the fruit trees are starting to bud, and then my... I remember, of course, the plums and everything are okay, but like our pear trees, I don't know why, they seemed like they always had to spray the pear trees, and I don't know if it's because there was always bugs that came on them, but it always, springtime it was always the pear trees. And of course, in that meantime, my mother has a garden by the chicken house, and we had quite a bit of chicken. In those days, the chickens were just kind of roaming around, even in our...

TI: Now, did you have to tend the chickens?

CH: Yeah, every day, they had to be fed, chickens had to be fed. And we just take their chicken feed, and my dad used to buy it by the sack, hundred pound sacks and he'd feed the chickens. Yeah, they had to be fed every day and put, fill the water, the tank with the water.

TI: Now would you ever have to kill the chickens for the Sunday dinner?

CH: [Laughs] After I got big, older, but my mother did that all the time. And she took an axe and cut the head off and then put a box on top of it, and the chicken would flop around, flop around, and then it died.

TI: And so eventually you had to do the same thing?

CH: Later on, yeah. But I didn't do too much of it, I don't think. I remember doing it, cutting the head off, but it was something I didn't want to do. [Laughs]

TI: You didn't care for it, you didn't like to do that?

CH: It was hard, a live chicken.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2014 Densho. All Rights Reserved.