Saltine Crackers

So about a year ago when everybody was sick, we got a box of saltine crackers.  Now everybody is throwing up again, and so I dug them out of the cupboards.  They were so stale my husband wouldn't eat them. 
When I was little, one of my favorite memories was grinding wheat with my mother.  We lived in a humid climate, and so she put saltine crackers mixed in the buckets of wheat to keep the wheat from molding like everything else.  As I used to dig through the wonderful feel of wheat heavy as it pressed down on my arms buried up to my elbows, I always thought it was a special treat to find a saltine cracker - something I'd never had the likes of before.
So I snuck and ate these saltine crackers, even though they are pretty gross as far as what is used to make them, and how they taste.  At least that is what others say.  They actually weren't nearly as stale as those ones I ate long ago.  And what can I say, I love the taste of stale saltine crackers.

I remember one month, when my oldest was about 6 and I had 4 or 5 little kids, we decided to go a month without spending any money at all, which was easy to decide, since we didn't have any.  We took turns that month grinding wheat by hand.  They got very competitive about it.  I was worried the novelty would wear off and I would be stuck, like so many other times, with 100 times more work to do and everybody else in the family thinking I'm a vending machine that can supply instant food at any time of day or night.  But they kept at it all month and ground every single bit of wheat we ate.  And there was this feeling that came with it, that you can't get any other way, this specifically special feeling of grinding our own food that went into our mouths.  Some sort of connection that has so rudely been broken in our modern society, and then we wonder why we aren't happy.


Hand Grain Mill