Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

they slept on opposite sides of the bed, with Tommy and me sleeping in between them. My daddy and my mother, Merritt Robertson (we started calling them Granny and Pa when our children were born), slept in a small middle room in the house. My youngest sister, Jan, was the baby of the family and slept in a crib next to my parents’ bed until she was old enough to sleep with Judy.
    The fireplace in the west room was the only place to get warm. It was made of the natural red stone of the area and was rather large. One of my brothers once joked that it was big enough to “burn up a wet mule.” Because the fireplace was the only source of heat in the home, it was my family’s gathering spot. Every morning in the winter, the first person out of bed—it always seemed to be Harold—was responsible for starting a fire. It would usually reignite with pine fatwood kindling, but sometimes you had to blow the coals to stoke the flames. Some of my favorite memories as a child were when we baked potatoes and roasted hickorynuts on the fireplace coals for snacks. We usually ate them with some of my mother’s homemade dill pickles. There was never any candy or junk food in our house.
    The only other room in the cabin was a combination kitchen and dining area. The cookstove was fueled by natural gas from a well that was located down the hill and across the creek. The pressure from the well was so low that it barely produced enough gas to cook. Pa always said we were lucky to have the luxury of running water in the house, even if it was only cold water coming through a one-inch pipe from a hand-dug well to the kitchen sink. We didn’t even have a bathtub or commode in the house! The water pipeline habitually froze during the winter, and my brothers and I spent many mornings unfreezing the pipe with hot coals from the fire. When the pipe was frozen, we’d grab a shovelful of coals and place them on the ground under the pipe. When we finally heard gurgling and then water spitting out of the kitchen sink, we knew we could return to the fire to get warm again.
    Breakfast began when Granny put a big pot of water on the stove to heat. We didn’t have a hot-water heater, so we bathed in cold water when I was young. Granny used the hot water for cooking and cleaning the dishes. Breakfast usually consisted of hot buttermilk biscuits, blindfolded fried eggs, butter, and fresh “sweet milk”: every morning, one of my brothers or I would takea pail of hot water to the barn to clean the cows’ udders after we milked them. There were always several jars of jams and jellies on our table. Pa and Granny canned them from wild fruits that grew in abundance in the Arklatex area. Pa liked to scold us for having too many jars open at once; he said we opened them just to hear the Ball jar lids pop. He may have been right.
    Nearly everything we ate came from our land. The eggs came from our chickens, the milk and butter from our cows. Bacon and sausage came from the hogs we raised and butchered. We canned vegetables from our large garden, which spread over about eight acres in three different patches. Cucumbers were turned into jars and jars of sweet, sour, bread-and-butter, and dill pickles. Our pantry shelves were lined with canned tomatoes, peppers, beets, and just about anything else my family grew, including pears, peaches, plums, and grapes, as well as the abundant dewberries and blackberries of the area. Cut-up cabbage, green tomatoes, onions, and peppers were mixed together and canned to make what we called chow-chow, a relish that was a delicious accompaniment to just about anything—especially fish.
    In addition to our garden, where we also grew such things as English peas, butter and pole beans, lettuce, turnips, mustard greens, onions, radishes, carrots, Irish and sweet potatoes, cantaloupes, and watermelons, my family grew several fields of peas, peanuts, and corn. We started many of the vegetables from seedsthat were planted in a hotbed (called a cold frame by some) in early February. My brothers and I gathered cow and horse manure, which, as it decomposed, kept the bed warm and enriched the soil. After the plants sprouted and grew big enough, we transferred them to the garden.
    One year Pa, figuring he would get a jump on the market for the early watermelons that brought the highest prices, had my brothers and I collect manure from the cow pens to put into two hundred holes. He directed us to dig the holes two feet square and two