Beech Tree News Network

My granddaughter is starting to be a picky eater.  The fact doesn’t shock me, because I know that kids go through phases.  A few days ago, my daughter was getting stressed out over not having anything in the house that Sabria would eat.  In my grandmotherly wisdom, I told my daughter to just go on with what she was doing and I would find something she would like.  I was feeling pretty smug about having a stash of Vienna Sausages in the pantry.  I knew Sabria would love them like I had as a child.  I told her they were little hotdogs as I placed one in her hand.  She took a bite, opened her mouth and spit it back into my hand.  “Nasty hot dog!” she said.  I was grief-stricken.  How could my own granddaughter not like one of my childhood staples?
Vienna Sausages are a food that is tied to my summer memories of being out in the woods with my parents.  My dad ran a sawmill, and my stepmother worked right along beside him.  When inventory got low on the lumber yard, my parents loaded up the mules, the chainsaws and axes, and us kids, and we all headed to the most recent tract of timber my dad had lined up.
Dad always had a crew of crazy guys working for him, and the mood was usually light; unless Doc (the mule) decided he wasn’t in the mood to drag walnut logs from the woods that day then my dad would get pretty heated.  Dad didn’t have much patience with animals, but he laughed and cut up with his work crew.  They had names like Dickie and Vance and Mose.  During a lull in activity, they might swing on a wild grapevine or beat out the rhythm of “Wipe Out” on a hollow log or paint the name “Wooly Bully” on the old G.I. truck.
We kids played in the woods, walking the length of felled trees, finding a grapevine that would support our weight or building playhouses out of sticks and rocks.  Lunch time was the highlight for us, especially since we got to the woods bright and early and there was no snacking in between meals—there were no cabinets to rummage through.  We were miles from the nearest town, so everybody packed a lunch.  Mom packed us crackers, Vienna Sausages, and Kool-Aid.  We kids would find a big tree stump to use as a table.  Dad would sit on the tailgate of his pickup and the guys would sit on their coolers.  Mom was usually tending to us.  We would eat and listen to the guys tell stories and pick at one another.  They were always posturing and trying to prove their intellectual superiority to one another.
When the work day was drawing to a close, we would pack up everything and head back to the sawmill to drop off the tools and unhitch the mules.  Mom would let us play in the sawdust pile before we went to the house.  It took me many years to figure out just how smart she was to let us do that, for you see, cedar sawdust is a natural cleaner.  We would emerge from our romp spic and span, with just a bit of sawdust to shake from our hair.
You know, if someone had offered me Vienna Sausages outside of the setting of a packed lunch on a summer trip to the woods, I too might have said, “Nasty hotdog,” but as it was, those small cans of food were a treat, a picnic of sorts.  To this day, I can’t hear a chainsaw fire up without also hearing the snap of a popup lid.  I’m hungry just thinking about it.