Childhood Memories

[Redoverfarm]

Can anyone tell of the most memorable childhood memory that they had growing up.

Although my childhood had several memorable times I think back to the most memorable time and this was it.

As for me it was probably working on a dairy farm which was next to our house.  The farmer was of German decent and a hard worker.  Milked 14 head daily(twice).  Although I was still going to school I was involved in the farm on a daily basis.  Our house was about 1/2 mile from the bus stop.  Every evening we would walk the cows from an adjoining pasture to where we caught the bus to the milking parlor and then start to work.  Thank goodness the age of automation had already reached the farm as the cows were being milked via vaccume rather than by hand. You still had to wash the cow hook up the individual milkers and then carry the milk to a bulk tank a short distance away.  Each week we would have to wash and disinfect the bulk tank after it was emptied by the milk truck.  There were daily chores such as feeding, cleaning out the milking parlor and washing the milking cans.  The you went onto the other seasonal chores.

I guess that is where I really learned to drive.  Everything on the farm for every reason.  Plowing, manure spreading ( loaded by hand with a pitchfork on rainy days) hay making, corn picking, fence building and at the time all around fun but with a working nature.  In fact I didn't really reconginize it as work in those days. 

Lunch time was anything he whipped up.  In fact everything was warmed up in the same skillet.  The first time I savored "pickled heart and tounge".  Most of the time it was just left overs but to me after working it was a feast.  The weekly ritual on Sunday after church was making ice cream. Of course the kids did the churning by hand.  Seemed like for ever before the Pinapple Ice Cream was ready but once you tasted it the time spent cranking disappeared.  His mother was still living at the time at the age of 92 of which he cared for on a daily basis which is where alot of the leftovers came from his evening meal that he prepared for his mother.   

There is so much that I learned from that fellow I cannot single out any particular thing only that I see it surface on a regular basis.  Common sense, reasoning, math, animal husbandry, and the list goes on.  I guess that is how I became aware of the true meaning of hard work which is learned not taught.  I try to teach my children the same values and rewards.

I hadn't kept real good track of Harold until several years ago I wanted to go look him up.  The farm has all but disappeared sitting along the banks of the Ohio River. It's real estate gobbled up by Dupont and Borg Warner.  He had another house that his wife lived some 10 miles away.  Funny you should ask but she didn't want any parts of farm life.  So he would go stay with her on Friday evening and return on Saturday evening after the chores were finished. That is the relationship they maintained for as long as I can remember. He and his wife never had any children and I guess that is why he took a liking to us.   He stayed at the farm during the week.  Back to the point was that he had passed away several years ago unbeknown to me.  Then reality set in and I said he would now be way over 100 years old.  Time has flown by without me even noticing.  The real reason I wanted to see him was to say  " THANK YOU".

[Ernest T. Bass]

My favorite memories are happening on a daily basis..

[Redoverfarm]

Andrew make good use of them.  Before long that is all they will be.

[Redoverfarm]

Ernest I sent you a PM.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

I've got a lot of favorite childhood memories, but one of the ones that stands out is the year we had an ice storm at Christmas.  It downed power lines and we were without electricity for a week or longer at the farm.  In early spring, we had to go out in the orchards and start pruning like crazy before the sap started running.  (We had over 110 acres with roughly half of it in apples and peaches or grapes.)  Anyway, over spring break that year, my cousin Greg and I (Greg was and is still one of my best friends) had to help haul off the limbs from the pruning.  This involved loading the hay trailer until branches heaped up on top so high that we could no longer throw them up and get them to stay and until the branches were hanging over both sides.  We spent every day, all day that spring break loading branches.  When the trailer was full, we'd make a trip to a gully that ran across a back corner of the property and we'd fill the gully with the pruned branches.  Then we could ride the trailer back to whichever orchard we were working in and start all over again.  I remember it being a lot of fun, even though by the end of the day we could barely walk because we were so dog tired.  We'd load from opposite sides of the trailer to make the load even, and we'd sing as we worked.  I remember making up extra verses to songs we knew to make them last longer, and making up songs as we were going.  When we'd take a load of branches to the gully, we had to walk behind the trailer because we had a family rule that there were no passengers on the tractor when the tractor was pulling anything.  The farm was terraced, so when we would walk behind the trailer, we'd hang on to the back boards and the trailer would top the terraces and send us flying into the air, which we thought was tremendous fun.

Later that same year, we had to thin apples like crazy because the severe pruning caused them to be absolutely loaded with fruit.  By late spring, the branches were almost breaking, so we all worked together to get them thinned enough that the branches wouldn't break and the fruit would be bigger and better.  We ate so many green apples that Grandma swore we'd get sick, but none of us did.  Two other cousins helped with the thinning, Mark and Kye.  It was the only time I ever got in a fistfight with one of my cousins.  I dropped an apple which hit Kye in the head.  He was about 4 years younger than me and a stout little hothead, AND he was playing under the trees with Red the cowdog instead of working like he was supposed to be.  I was standing on the step on the ladder which says "This is not a step.  Do not stand on or above this step." Kye charged at the ladder and knocked it out from under me, but I thankfully hit the ground on my feet only to get punched with a fistful of clay on my landing.  I didn't even know what was wrong with him, but he was yelling and swinging.  He outweighed me by quite a bit, but he was a little shorter and younger.  I never even threw a punch, mostly just ducked and blocked.  Finally, I got tired of it and grabbed him by both shoulders and sat him down hard in the dirt.  I still remember my grandpa sitting on the tailgate of the truck and watching in utter amusement, but he never said a word to either of us, nor did he do anything to either of us.  Kye sat huffing on the ground and I remember the dust coming up and settling back down over him in a golden cloud and streaking down his face in muddy little rivers of sweat and dirt, and then he stormed off to the mudhole on the lane and sat in a wheel rut plotting his revenge until sundown.  

 That year we had huge crops of apples, peaches, and grapes.  The prettiest ones I ever remember.  Grandpa sent me and Greg to every farmer's market that year to sell (people would buy stuff from cute little kids just because we were kids... Grandpa was no dummy.)  After picking peaches all day, I'd go set up on the corner of the highway with bushel and half-bushel baskets of peaches and sell them to folks headed home from work.  I wondered how sales people could sell products that they didn't believe in.  I knew our peaches and grapes were the best around, so I was good at selling them because I knew what had gone into them.  I knew what they were really worth.  I knew about the different varieties, and when people would ask me if the Georgia Belles were ready, I could tell them which week they would be ready, and if they asked which ones were clings or freestone, I knew that too.  I remember being really proud of my family and our way of life and of our produce.  If people just got a taste, they'd never go back to anything else.  

 The grapes were so thick that summer (they were every summer, but that summer was a bumper crop of everything) that we couldn't even keep up with them.  Every day from sun up to sun down we were dealing with the productivity of our farm.   I remember helping an elderly lady named Jewel pick a few bushels of grapes.  She'd come out to the farm to pick for several years, and I always enjoyed talking with her.  That summer, when she was making jelly from our grapes, she dropped a pan and got burned really badly and her jelly was ruined, so I picked her another bushel or two and Grandma and I drove it over to her and gave them to her.  She'd called grandma when she was still at the burn center worried that we wouldn't have any grapes left for her to make jelly by the time she got out of the hospital, so we made it a point to set them aside for her, and I think her kids froze them whole for her so that she could make the jelly later.  Every year was like that, but that is the time that really stands out because I don't think I ever have worked harder in my life, or had more fun.  

That was the year that all the aunts and uncles and cousins would sit around in the shade of the big box elder by the well house and shell peas and shuck corn to get it all put away, and it seemed like there was company for every meal that whole summer, though I know that surely some of them had to have eaten at home part of the time.  Grandma and I canned tomatoes on top of tomatoes on top of more tomatoes.  We figured out that a bushel of tomatoes had to weigh at least 75 lbs.  I could carry one by myself, but the cousins had to carry a basket between two of them.  I got so sick of washing canning jars from the cellar that summer!

[Redoverfarm]

Maybe just lost in the shuffle.  Maybe no one ever grew up or worse they have no Childhood Memories. The say that a significant childhood incident dictates the person we are today.  As I have listened to many stories of different people and the stories of their childhood they all say " And I remember".   Do You?

[glenn kangiser]

Probably getting out of the house to work with my old dead uncle.

He taught me how to contract - do construction at about nine. Drive,  cuss, shoot....expected us kids to cuss him out as bad as he cussed us out.  Those were the good ol' days.

Actually he was my dad's uncle, grandma's brother.  Good ol' fart.   Nothing would please him more than to walk over next to us and drop an SBD.... or maybe even a big one.

A bit of a womanizer, my mom and some aunts didn't care for him but he did care about teaching kids a trade and that made him a great man in my opinion.