Night Weather – Fall, Week 12: Molasses, Hurricane Helene, and Hogs

​Cynthia Reeves, “Of Rhythm and Season,” mid-1970s

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first hard freeze
the scalded hog
hangs by its feet

*****

Traditional rural life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina was marked by seasonal activities. In early fall, the community gathered to harvest sorghum cane and make molasses. On October 12, 2024, Patti and I drove with my sister to Caldwell County to watch molasses being cooked. The cane had been cut and juiced the day before. The harvest was unusually difficult: Helene knocked the cane flat. It was not ruined even though many of the canes were broken. One of the farmers told me that gathering the canes was like pulling noodles from a plate of spaghetti, another that the canes were woven like a basket. Normally, the standing cane would be stripped of its leaves while standing in the field then cut and taken to the device for squeezing the juice out. Helene made this part of the job much more difficult.

The juice was placed on a long rectangular pan over a woodfire about five in the morning and cooked for eight hours. By the time we got there, about 10:30 in the morning, the juice had been cooked down about halfway and was constantly being stirred, removing the green scum of exploded cell walls (cellulose) and DNA (protein) (one of the farmers has a PhD in plant science). By 1, it was ready. The pan was removed from the fire and set on two sawhorses, one slightly higher than the other, so that the molasses could flow out the spigot at the end of the pan into a large washtub. The washtub was moved to a platform and the tub’s spigot was opened to let the molasses flow into jars. A crowd of people were waiting to buy each jar as soon as it was full. We had bought our jars earlier, from the batch cooked on the previous day. It is freer flowing than molasses I’ve had in the past, but unusually tasty, wonderful on hot biscuits with melted butter.

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After the first hard freeze in the fall, on Thanksgiving Day if it was cold enough, the community came together to slaughter and butcher their hogs. It had to be cold so that the hog’s body heat would rapidly dissipate and “the meat would … cure instead of spoil.” (

It was an important day. As my father put it in his memoirs, “Hog meat … was the main source of fat and protein in the mountain man’s diet” (“The Travles [sic] of John,” unpublished). My father learned to butcher hogs at a young age and was quite proud of his skill. He described the process in detail. The hog is shot in the head. “An expert slips a sharp knife between the shoulders at exactly the right place and severs the jugular artery so that the hog bleeds freely thus removing the blood from the meat.” The men lift the hog—it weighs 220 pounds or more—onto “a table above the vat of hot water” that has been heating up over a woodfire since 4:30 am. “The expert checks the temperature of the water with his finger. Water that is too hot will set the hair until the devil couldn’t scrape it off.” If the “water … is just right,” turning the hog over a time or two in the vat will remove the hair.” Any remaining hair is removed by scrapers.

“The hog is clean and ready for the butcher, but first it must be hung up where the butcher can work and out of the way of the killing and scraping crews.… The butcher splits the skin on the backside of the hind leg about six inches from just above the foot exposing the tendons or leaders. A hook from the single tree [or a gambling stick] is slipped behind the tendons on each leg and now by means of rope block and tackle the hog is pulled up to the hanging pole. The hog head swings just high enough above the ground so that a dishpan will slip under the head. The head comes off first and is set aside out of the way until one of the men splits it apart to be made into souse meat by one of the women. The butcher then takes a very sharp knife and marks a line starting dead center between the hind legs and down the hog to dead center between the front legs.” Then the butcher carefully ties off the anus and works downward, toward the head, removing the lungs (“the lights”) and other internal organs and carefully cutting away the intestines without nicking them.

I won’t describe the rest of the process, but the long day ended in a feast of fresh tenderloin and hams, shoulders, and side meat ready to feed the families for the next twelve months.

*****

the cow's wet nose
flecked with oats
sweetened by molasses

*****

winter coming
how comforting
to watch the groundhog
fill its belly

*****

December 7, 1941

One of my maternal grandmother’s brothers was Bower. I probably met him a time or two, but I don’t remember him.

He would have been worth talking to. He landed at Utah Beach on D-Day (80 years ago on June 6, 1944) and later was in charge of the burial detail at Arlington National Cemetery and worked on security at the White House during the Truman administration.

According to his obituary, he was already in the army when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941, eighty-three years ago today. He married on the very next day. One can only imagine the emotions that he and his bride felt, knowing that his duty would call him away and put him in danger for an unknown period of years.

They were married till he died 63 years later.

​Posted 7 December 2024