Aunt Katherine Goes Squirrel Hunting by Cousin Debra

Katherine Healey Rossignol in Hunting Apparel at the Farm

Cousin Debra submitted this remembrance:

Squirrels!

Upon reflection, I’ve come to realize just how special it was to grow up with my mother’s memories of her life on The Farm flowing forth through her reminiscing. You really couldn’t hear the stories enough times… My mother, Katherine Bassett Healey Rossignol, was the fourth born child to Amelia and Harry Healey in the year 1918. She graduated high school in 1935 so the window of farm life in Connecticut that she reflected on was the 1920’s – 30’s. It would appear that things were approached from a more “survivalist” stance than what we know now. 

Ma spoke of it being “completely natural” to have guns in the house… She would say, “We always had guns and we all knew how to use them.” She never spoke much about deer hunting, but I believe I do recall her mentioning Uncle Sonny bringing one home occasionally. What she did tell about was her experiences squirrel hunting!

The family did not find the hunting and consumption of squirrel unusual, so much so that the house rule was “You shoot it, you clean it.” Ma said that in 1942-43, while expecting my eldest brother Vinnie, she “was up in the woods hunting squirrel” and she wondered in retrospect how the blast from the gun shot affected Vinnie being in the womb. The things we take for granted unknowingly in the moment… Vinnie is just fine!

How well the family handled their guns is yet another story or two! Uncle Sonny apparently shot himself right through his own foot while cleaning his gun. Thankfully, he was sitting outside on the kitchen step because Ma told of another sibling cleaning a gun in the kitchen when it accidentally went off. The bullet shot through the ceiling to the “pool room” upstairs. The chuckle revolved around “being lucky no one was upstairs in bed at the time.” Lucky, indeed!

So, I have not eaten squirrel personally… Ma said, “It was okay; not much of it!” Perhaps some of my elder cousins partook of this farm delicacy when they were little folk before my arrival on the scene in 1958.