I think whether you look down on hunting depends a lot on what alternatives you have. And who exactly were the hunters that they looked down on? Indians, maybe? My mother grew up in the Ozarks, and they ate possum, squirrel, rabbit—not regularly, but occasionally. If you eat possum, it's only because you need the nourishment. There were 11 kids in her family. If they ever shot anything as big as a deer, I never heard about it. In some parts of the Ozarks there were wild pigs. That is, pigs that had escaped from a farm and reverted to the wild state. I don't know if my mom's family hunted them, though.

Other things in the story rang true. Like the kids having oranges as a rare treat. My dad told me that when he was growing up in Kentucky, the kids would each get an orange and a peppermint stick for Christmas, and that's all they would get. And they were mighty glad to get it.

Yes, in Kansas they would have built sod houses and used buffalo chips for fuel. Tornadoes are a lot rarer than non-midwesterners tend to think. They're very destructive, but usually only within a narrow path, and your chance of being in that path is quite small. A root cellar isn't always just a root cellar. In fact, the people I have known who had them called them "storm cellars" because that was their primary purpose—as a refuge for the family in case of a severe storm—not only a tornado.

Would kids be traumatized by watching livestock be killed? I don't know. I watched my grandpa chop the head off a chicken when I was a little tike, and it didn't traumatize me, but then I wasn't attached to the chicken. In fact I was afraid of them. There was a rooster that used to chase me!

I think people who grow up with farm animals, at least people in my parents' generation, simply steeled themselves against the emotional pain of losing pets. They thought it was an important part of character development that you had to learn to do this. When I was a kid, we had a beagle that was supposed to be both a pet for me and a hunting dog for my father. When my father figured out that the dog was useless as a hunting dog—he was "gun shy" probably because I had frightened him with my toy guns—my dad insisted we give him away. He knew somebody who wanted him, or so he said, but I wonder.... Anyway, the dog disappeared. I was heartbroken, but my dad wouldn't budge. Was that cruel? Maybe so, but his upbringing taught him that you couldn't afford a non-working animal. Even cats had to catch mice.