It must have been in the Smoke House

About six months ago I bought a new truck.  It had a fancy key that remotely does all sorts of things before you get in the cab.  As luck would have it recently I couldn't find the key.  I looked for several days.  Since I always put keys in the same place, I was baffled.  I finally decided the most logical answer was that I inadvertently dropped in the garbage can when I threw some trash away.  The can was emptied and the key was gone.  Fortunately I had a second key with the key code. 

During the search I recalled an old family saying. Whenever something was missing and couldn't be located, My Aunt or Mother would say,  "It must have been in the Smoke House"  or "It must have been in the top drawer.  Growing up I never questioned the meaning of either statement,  I just knew that they both meant, "Whatever it was you were looking for was gone". 

Since I had not heard these sayings used outside the family, I asked my Mother what was the origin of the sayings.  Well living in rural Texas, everyone had a smoke house that was used for smoking meat. A fire box was outside and the smoke channelled into the small shed to cook and smoke meat.  Today this process is done with modern, and in many cases, portable equipment.  As time passed the "smoke houses were used less for cooking and in a lot of cases, storage facilities.  Somewhere in the family, after the conversion from meat to storage, the smoke house caught fire and burned to the ground, along with everything inside.   Thus, what was inside was gone and anytime something couldn't be found "It must have been in the Smoke House"

The other saying, according to my Aunt,  originated sometime in the mid 19th century when some of our family members were moving from Tennessee to Texas in a wagon.  Reaching their destination they discovered that the top drawer of the chest of drawers had fallen out of the wagon along the way and everything in it was gone.  Therefore, My key could have "been in the top drawer".

Oh, by the way, a new, programmed key costs $250.00.  Finding that out you could say that I was:

1. Hotter than a two-dollar pistol
2. Hotter than a depot stove
or
3. Hotter than a four-balled tom-cat.