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Plowin’ Time One
good farm memory brings up a By
Vince Carpenter This
did not take place in the Ozarks, but in that near-Appalachian area of
coal mining and steel-making of eastern Ohio and northern West Virginia.
Only the geography is different, not the people. And spring! Isn't
spring the same everywhere, when we watch the rebirth of the world
around us? Well,
this happened one spring day, years ago. Maybe about 1950. Dad
and Mother--and, of course, us kids--lived there at Stop 15, which was
called that because of the streetcars. The streetcars (and later the
buses) would stop at designated spots, and those spots were know as
“Stops.” They had names, too; Stop 15, for example, was Overbrook
Drive. No one referred to them that way, though; they were all
“Stops.” The house there was an old, but big house, and there were
two barns on the property, along with a chicken coop; there were about
thirteen acres of bottom
land, which were very fertile, 'cause bottom land meant land by the
crick that got flooded once or twice a year. The
folks rented the place from Jimmy S______ for thirty-five dollars a
month; for that we not only rented the house, but we could use the barn
by the house, too, and it had the chicken coop attached to it. When we
moved in, my brother Jim and I caught on to that chicken coop right
away. Wow! We were gonna have chickens!! Mother and Dad quickly vetoed
that idea, and it took us a couple of years to figure a way around that
veto. We eventually gave Mother and Dad two live chickens as an
anniversary present; they couldn't turn down an anniversary gift from
their two sons, could they? Heh, heh... Jimmy
S______ rented out the second barn and the cropland to a farmer each
year, and they usually grew corn on it, although I remember one year
when the farmer grew three or four acres of tomatoes, then grew corn on
the rest of it. And, thank goodness, that's what saved me in one
particular instance. The
farmer kept his draft horse in the barn, and in the Year of the Tomatoes
he had two sheep in there, too. Why did he have sheep there, and why
only two sheep? I don't have the foggiest idea. At any rate, the farmer
hired me to feed the sheep each day. To do so, I had to open the walk-in
door and go straight ahead, nervously passing the south end of the draft
horse. I wasn't at all familiar with horses, although in my day dreams I
would grow up to own a livery stable called Shamrock Stables. I didn't
know anything about horses, but I loved 'em. I figured I knew about
horses, because I'd read Anna Sewells' Black Beauty. After
carefully passing the horse, I'd go farther into the barn, get the feed,
and feed the sheep. Except for one evening. That evening the sheep met
me at the door, and I was so surprised that the sheep got around me and
escaped! Oh, NO!! What am I gonna do now?! I fell in behind those two
sheep, running like crazy around that tomato field; I can remember how
dumb that second sheep was, just following the first one around, when he
could have gone another direction and made good his escape. But as I
look back on it, I have to remember that I was third in line. And I
followed those two sheep around that tomato patch like a caboose on a
freight train. And I was! They were in charge! Thanks
be, though, for the three or four acre tomato field, which was fenced
off from the cornfield, and the corn field had no perimeter fence. The
sheep finally tired of running around that field with me in tow, and
headed back into the barn. But if they'd gotten into that corn field, I
probably never would have got 'em back in the barn. But
I digress. Plowin' Time was what was on my mind, but when you remember
one “farmy” thing, it brings others to mind. The
first year the horse was kept in the barn, when I got home from school
on that short last-day-of-the-school-year, I found that Jim had arrived
home some time before I did; I took my final report card in to Mother,
and asked where Jim was. She pointed out to the corn field, and there
was Jim riding the plowin' horse, with the farmer manning the plow
behind the horse. The farmer had come up to the house, asking for me to
ride the horse, but Jim got home first, and I didn't get to ride the
horse. Me!! The one who loved horses, the one with the stable
dreams--Shamrock Stables--and Jim got to ride the horse! Well,
the years have gone by, and they have been kind to both Jim and me, and
I've ridden a lot of horses between then and now. At one time, we had
four of the critters on our place here in the Ozarks: Mandy, Pep, Lance,
Gwen... I
never did have a Shamrock Stables. But
don't we all have dreams, some that come to be, and perhaps we are blest
that not all come to be, eh? Maybe
another life, another time... Vince Carpenter, a retired Air Force Major, has lived with his wife in the country in the Ozarks for 30 years, where they garden, mow and tend a large yard, and now care for their two Bullmastiffs, George and Gracie, since their five children are adults, and are scattered to the Four Winds. As transplanted Ohioans, they always root for THE Ohio State University Buckeyes.
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