Ingenuity provided other improvements to their living arrangements. Maud spent a lot of time and effort putting up fruit, vegetables and even meat in half gallon glass canning jars. In the winter, it was quite possible to have things freeze in an unheated room, and those glass jars needed to be protected. Uncle Gatis built a pantry for Maud in a corner of her kitchen with a door and sawdust-filled walls for insulation.
Hubert probably plowed up the garden for Maud in the spring, or had it done, and he may have helped her in some other ways as well, but household things were mostly her job. He needed to spend his time on the mill, but he probably enjoyed it more too. In their, probably unspoken, "division of labor" he was supposed to keep the fence up around the garden to prevent "open range" animals from getting into the garden and damaging or destroying it. He often neglected to keep it in good repair.
Time after time the neighbors’ pigs would get into the garden and she would have to run out and chase them away. One time she must have been particularly frustrated when the pigs appeared again. This time she determined to teach them a lesson they wouldn’t forget. She scooped up a shovel full of hot coals from the fireplace, ran out to the pigs where they were trying to escape her wrath by going to the barn. She threw the hot coals at them! She would probably have felt great about all this except for one problem – it caught the barn on fire and burned it down! She was very fearful of Hubert’s anger, but I’m glad to report that nobody remembers much of a reaction on his part.
Maud had two babies that were either born dead or lived only a few hours. There is some question about when they were born, but possibly 1913 and 1914. Their little graves can still be found near where the old house stood, marked with hand made bricks. Lorene and Myrtle went over to the old "Clark houseplace" near where Hubert’s gristmill was first located, found the bricks and brought them over. Samuel Cleston Martin was born May 31, 1915 and Claren Otis was born December 10, 1917.