John Flores: Christmas at Gramma's, living closer to nature

My grandmother, Grace Miller, was a petite woman who was the only real constant I knew growing up. She was part of the generation that suffered through the Great Depression and two world wars, not to mention the various trials everyone is destined to go through at some point in their lifetime.
By trials, I’m not talking about the narcissistic drama posted on social media these days. No, I’m talking about a generation of people who grew up in an age where there were few specialists when it came to medicine. If you were lucky, you might have had a telephone, or at the very least your neighbor had one you could borrow. And, if there was an emergency, in most rural areas it had to be a real emergency, because there weren’t any Urgent Cares around back then either.
My grandmother and her siblings were raised on a 40-acre farm in the snow country of northern Michigan in Wexford County near the town of Harrietta. I was told she owned a restaurant in her younger years. I never doubted whether this was true because Gramma always said she could make something out of nothing.
It’s the “something” I can most certainly vouch for.
I know to this day, my love for the outdoors came from her line of the family. When I was old enough to sit still and listen, she once told me how as a girl she fished for brook trout in the streams up north. She told me how she’d place a fern inside the cavity of the gutted fish to help keep them cool in a whicker creel basket.
She also told me when she was a young girl what her grocery list consisted of. flour, sugar, lard, coffee, and tobacco. Everything else they grew, raised, caught, picked or hunted, she said.
The seeds of my growing up to hunt and fish were planted at her house on Lewis Street, on the eastside of Flint, Michigan. While sitting in a lounge chair in her living room, I’d read and look at the pictures in Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and Sports Afield magazines for hours. They belonged to my Uncle Earl, who was an avid deer hunter.
My five siblings and I wound up being the victims of an ugly divorce when I was at the impressionable age of 9 years old. Our parents, unfortunately, never thought through things and we kids ended up in a couple custody battles going back and forth between them.
It was while I was living with my father, my mother decided to buy me a shotgun for Christmas. No doubt it was to spite my father and show him she still had some control, but that mattered little to me.
My father and stepmother had moved out of the city of Flint to a subdivision in the rural community of Rankin. While riding to school on the bus, the other boys my age talked about hunting, .30-.30 rifles and 12-gauge shotguns. I didn’t have clue what these numbers meant, but what I did know is I wanted to hunt.
It upset my father so bad, he never took me out to shoot the gift – a little crack-barrel Harrington & Richardson 20-gauge. But one of the older boys, a guy by the name of Dan Drake, did take me. And at 13, I learned to shoot it.
The following year I took the hunter’s safety class required by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and bought my first small game license for the sum of $3.
I didn’t do so well that first season or my second season for that matter. I missed pheasants. I missed quail. I missed rabbits and just didn’t have the knack it seemed at hitting moving objects running or flying. That said, I never quit or became discouraged.
By the time I turned 16 we were back living with our mother again. This time it was she who decided to move out of Flint, and we wound up in the town of Durand.
It also was a rural farming community, where the farmers in the area never had a problem with boys hunting their woodlots, sloughs, fence lines or harvested cornfields.
My grandmother lived with us for a while during my teenage years. My mother had to work nights at the General Motors Buick Fisher Body Plant, in Flint. The plant was famous for building Sherman M4 tanks during World War II. So, my gramma filled in to help mom out.
One year, during Christmas break, my brother Michael and I decided to go rabbit hunting. That October, I had killed my first pheasants and it seemed like I was starting to get the hang of hunting. Between the invitations I got from the older fellas in the neighborhood, reading countless how-to articles, and going every chance I got, I was learning to be a hunter.
It also didn’t hurt that I was old enough to drive. On weekends I’d pretty much come and go as I pleased if I wasn’t scheduled to work at Carter’s IGA in town.
It was cold out and there was a lot of snow on the ground that day. Mike and I were hunting a little cattail slough surrounded by trees between a couple of cornfields, where there was plenty of rabbit sign.
I learned that sloughs had numerous logs and tag alders mixed in with those cattails that formed an impenetrable warm cover for small game to huddle up in. It was easy walking, because the shallow ankle-deep water in the slough had completely frozen over with a thick layer of ice.
Anyone could see the bunny tracks and droppings and even a splash of yellow snow leading into the thickets. All you had to do was follow the tracks and tramp that stuff to jump them. It wasn’t long, where Mike and I did just that.
There’s nothing quite like a cottontail rabbit busting out of a snowbank putting distance between you and it.
We killed two cottontails that morning and did the best we could field dressing them. If I had a weakness at that time, it was game handling and preparation. They didn’t talk much about that in the magazines I read, nor did I have anyone to really show me.
My grandmother met us at the back door when we got home and said, “What did you get Johnny?” and I showed her the two rabbits. I remember them being pretty shot up, full of hair, and not cleaned very well.
It didn’t matter. She made over them like they were the best meat she ever cooked with.
She also heaped praise on us for our kill, making us feel like we really did something special. And the next time I saw those rabbits, they were part of a Christmas meal and absolutely delicious. There was not a speck of hair, piece of No. 6 lead shot, or broken bone in the meat.
I’ll never forget my grandmother, the stories she used to tell me, or the Christmas’s we spent together.
To all of you, I wish you a Merry Christmas and I’ll see you next year …