My Dad and His Spring Onions | Eastern North Carolina Now

    My Dad and I used to plant a 50-foot row of spring onions. It was right by the side of the path leading to the horse barn. It was just an old red barn but we referred to it as the stable because it had 2 stalls for horses, a tack room and an under shed storage area, as well as a big hay loft. We built it ourselves.

    Well many times when my Dad would be going out to check on the horses or other stock in the barn; before leaving the house, he would take two pieces of white store bought bread and coat them both with butter.

    Then on the way to the barn, he would pick out a big spring onion and pull it out of the ground. He would wash it off in the manual pump horse trough, put it between the two pieces of buttered bread, and have a spring onion sandwich.

    He would usually just eat the onion and feed the green stem to the horses. Well sometimes he would feed so much of the green stems to the horses that when they snorted, their breath would blow you away and knock you over. We never ever got rid of any food because anything leftover would always be feed for the horses.

    In addition to their regular sweet mix feed and oats and hay, they would eat pancakes, eggs, breads, anything else we had left over that my mother was afraid would go bad.
Old barn in Stone Mountain: Above.     photo by Tony Adams
    Update -Here is an update on the Green Onion Story. I woke up this morning and for some reason I had a random thought on Dad and his green onions. Somewhere he had read an article about how good goat's milk was for your digestive system. As was his practice, he acquired a goat. His habit of feeding the scraps to horses fit right in with having a goat because as almost everyone knows, a goat will eat almost anything.

    One morning while he was drinking his goat milk, he stopped and shouted, "who in the hell has been messing with my milk?" Mom asked what was wrong and he said it was bitter. Shortly after that the goat was weaned from spring onions.
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( May 2nd, 2015 @ 6:59 am )
 
Great photo and story. This is the shortest short story of yours I have ever read. If I remember correctly, the barn was built with recycled wood. Your parents wasted nothing.
Hope you publish more of your works soon. Good luck.



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