Digging bait was always fun, mainly because it was preparation for a fishing trip.  We used all kind of bait in local ponds to catch bream, catfish, a few bass and a good many turtles, and red wigglers were one of our favorite baits.

    On our farm we had seven chicken houses with a total of 11,000 laying hens.  The four old houses were long wooden sheds with chicken wire walls. The birds ran free inside on the wood shaving floor.  Their roosts were wooden frames set down the length of the house on either side of the center. 

    The support posts inside divided the width into thirds. On the downhill side, a galvanized trough three inches wide and five inches deep ran the length of the houses at a slight slant.  At one end was a faucet that dripped constantly. At the other end a nipple in the drain stuck up about four inches and acted as an overflow pipe much like the one in a pond, keeping water up to four inches deep the length of the trough. Water slowly ran over the top and out a pipe to the outside.

    The water was very fertile since chickens are not real careful where they leave their droppings, and every morning one of my jobs was to remove the nipple, turn the water on at the other end and walk the length of the trough with an old broom, cleaning out the mess.  It flowed out the drain pipe.

    The ground behind the house near the drain was always wet from the constant flow of water and extremely rich from all the droppings washed out every day.  Red wigglers found it an ideal habitat and we could dig a can full in a few minutes with just one or two scoops of dirt with a shovel.  There would be dozens of worms in every shovel full and picking them up from the ooze was easy.

    Every critter that lives in water loves red wigglers. We even caught crawfish on them when fishing for catfish on the bottom.  They were our staple bait when fishing but we did have many others.

    The chickens themselves provided great catfish bait.  With that many birds on the farm, a few died every day and I would cut them open and take out the heart, liver and gizzard.  Those innards put in a jar and set in the sun to ripen made an irresistible bait for catfish of kinds.  The livers were soft and hard to keep on the hook but gizzards and hearts were tough enough to last through several fish, if we could get past the smell when putting them on the hook.

    One of mom’s favorite baits were meal worms. We didn’t buy them, we grew our own.  Mom would fill a coffee can half full of corn meal and flour siftings and let it sit open for a few days, then put a cover of cheese cloth or old curtain sheer over it. 

    The eggs the flies laid in the corn meal while the top was open soon hatched into grubs, also called maggots, and grew from tiny white worms barely visible to light brown bait about an inch long. If left too long they turned black and tough and fish did not like them much.  After that stage they soon emerged as young flies.

    Although maggots stunk when taken from dead critters, taking on the smell of rotten meat, they were clean and odorless when grown in corn meal.

    Anything we could catch was tried as bait. Grasshoppers, wild crickets, caterpillars, crawfish, big white grub worms and wasp eggs were all good and most harmless. But wasp eggs were a special problem.

    First, just getting the nest with the larvae growing in it was dangerous. We did not want to spray the nest with poison to kill the adults guarding the nest since it tainted or killed the larvae.  What I would usually do after locating a good nest during the day was go back in the dark, knock it to the ground with a long pole and run off. 

    Wasps do not fly in the dark so after a few minutes I could go back and pick up the nest, being careful to step on any adult wasps that had stayed with the nest.  You could not wait too long to go back for it since ants would quickly find the source of food and be all over the nest.

    The nest was then put in the refrigerator in a paper sack to slow down the growth of the larvae.    You had to be very careful when taking the sack out for a fishing trip since some larvae would come out as an adult even in the cold.  Since they were cold they were sluggish but you had to open the sack carefully and kill any adults that were barely able to move around and sting you.

    I found out the hard way that a sack with a nest in it, left in the sun while fishing, would make any larvae close to changing make the transition to adult quickly. More than once, in the excitement of catching fish, I would reach into the bag to get a new bait and get stung by a newly changed adult wasp.

    A friend once told me how he would take tiny pieces of meat and stick a little strip of cigarette paper on it.  Left outside, a yellowjacket would often pick up the piece of meat to take to their underground nest. He could follow them to the nest by tracking the tiny white dot of paper.

    Yellowjackets build big underground nest with paper cells that look like wasps nest.  My friend said he could sell a big nest to fishermen too timid to try to get them on their own for several dollars.

    I did not know about yellowjacket nests as a kid or I am sure I would have tried his trick to get my own bait!  

 Christmas is a bittersweet time for me.  All the good and not so good memories come flooding back and I know those days and times are gone from my life forever.  Memories are all that are left.

    Good ones involve getting up Christmas morning to the joy of toys and unexpected gifts.  I guess my brother and I were a bit greedy, we hung one of mama’s old stockings on the mantle rather than a big sock.

But they were always filled with everything from oranges, bananas and pecans to rolls of caps, boxes of sparklers, bags of candy, boxes of .22 bullets and many other necessities of life.  I think Santa picked up the pecans from our yard and the oranges from the big bag we always brought back from our week before Christmas visit to grandma in Ocala.

    There were the gifts Santa left, which included one big gift and many smaller ones each year.  Big things I remember best are the high-power BB/pellet gun I got when I was 10, the strongest on the market at the time.  It would fire a pellet with the same velocity as a .22 short. And the Remington semiautomatic .22 I got when I was 12, the real thing. 

One year I got a set of Duckback briar britches and coat, a great need when quail and rabbit hunting.  Another is the stand that had metal ducks that revolved, and a gun that shot rubber suction darts at it.

    Smaller gifts included the usual underwear and socks, but even more appreciated were the insulated hunting versions of them.  Boxes of .410 shells, hunting knives, mess kits, hunting caps, hand warmers, fishing lures and other outdoor stuff topped the list.

    One memory brings back sad regret.  When I was about 12 I wanted a new bicycle, as did my brother.  But those were very lean years.  Daddy was the principal and shop teacher at Dearing Elementary School and one afternoon I walked into the shop while waiting on him to go home.

    Hanging from wires were two old bicycles that had been carefully disassembled, sanded and painted.  Daddy had got some junked bikes and repaired them to almost new status.  I got a sinking feeling when I saw them, I knew that would be my present, not a new one.

    I am afraid daddy saw the disappointment in my eyes Christmas morning, and it no doubt broke his heart.  He did the best he could, sacrificing things he wanted to do more for us, and working to make us something he could not afford, even thought he worked all day at school then went home to run our farm.

    I loved that bike and rode it for years.  I would give anything to be able to go back and thank him for it and tell him how much that memory means to me.

    A happier memory is when I was about 8 or 9 years old.  I knew about Santa but my younger brother still believed, although he was starting to question it.

    Our old house had a bathroom in the back off my grandmother’s apartment that we seldom used after she moved out.  For some reason I went to the bathroom a couple days before Christmas and heard birds chirping. When I pulled back the shower curtain a bird cage with two parakeets was hidden back there.

    Christmas Eve Billy and I went to bed but could not sleep. He kept asking me about Santa. It told him let’s make a wish for something no one but Santa would know and see if it comes true.  Let’s wish for parakeets! 

    The next morning he was excited and amazed to see the birds in our gifts.  My parents almost messed it up, saying the birds were from them, not Santa.  I convinced my brother since Santa knew they were giving us birds he didn’t need to. He believed another year!

    I do not ever remember getting daddy anything, but when I got old enough, I always had to find a bag of chocolate crème drops for mama. She loved them and chocolate covered cherries so I tried to make sure she had some.  That is really the only kind of bought sweets she ever ate, all the rest were homemade.

    One very sad gift memory involves a neighbor. Lynn was about two years younger than me and a tomboy so she liked the same kinds of things I liked. My family went to visit for dinner a few days after Christmas.

    Lynn had gotten a stand-up punching toy, about five feet tall shaped like snowman with a heavy weight bottom so hit bobbed back up when you hit it.  I must have been nine or ten, and we were warned to keep the toy away from the floor furnace vent, it was very hot.

    Stupid me drug the punching toy across the vent and the heat melted the plastic with a loud pop. Of course Lynn started crying. That pretty much ended the visit. I felt terrible but could do nothing.  I wonder if daddy bought her another one, if he did I never knew.

    As an adult presents really don’t mean much anymore.  I tend to buy whatever I want when I want it, so it is hard to buy something for me.  Gone is the joy and wonderment of Christmas morning.

    If you have kids, make this as truly a wonderous time of the year as long as possible.