My first memories existed in a two-story clapboard farmhouse with a tin roof.
We didn't have cows. I think we had chickens. No pigs except for the hog farm run by my uncle who had something to do with the Piggly Wiggly. I knew about the hog farm because I went there years later. This is after we had left the two-story clapboard farmhouse with a the tin roof.
My uncle (not the one who owned the hog farm, but another one who must have agreed to feed them for him) would pull up in this smelly old truck with rotting tomatoes in the back. We were told we could pick the good tomatoes out and the rest were headed to the hog farm. We ran inside and grabbed our garbage bags. Free tomatoes! Then, we climbed into the back of the open pick-up being very careful not to get the squishy tomatoes on our clothes.
You think the truck was smelly? The hog farm was much worse but it was interesting to see one for the first time. We had to be very careful not to fall into the styes but how cute it was to see them run over to the troughs and slurp up those smelly tomatoes. Now I know why I hate flies so much.
Our two-story clapboard house was actually owned by my great-grandmother and great-grandfather who was no longer with us. My grandmother stayed there and that's where after I was born lived there until I was seven.
It's miraculous but even at that young age, memories are clear and vivid.
I remember sitting at what must have been a bar...don't remember it being a table and the train would blow in rattling everything on the walls. The kids next door who would visit their grandmother would come by and we'd put pennies on the tracks hoping the train would flatten them. They became our lucky pennies.
Were they the good ol' days? If not, then why are designers designing homes with the farmhouse theme? Because it was a simple life - hard yet simple. No computers. No cell phones. No color TV. Some had black and white if you were rich enough.
Would I want to go back? Hell yeah.
I never grew up on a farm. I was a city kid but my mother's brothers and sisters lived on Farmland. One of her brothers raise chickens. As a child growing up and even as a young adult we would go to his house. It seem like the chicken house he had stretched on for miles and miles. So I know what you're talking about when you say the stench of a farm haha. My grandmother and one of my mom's oldest sister's head chickens in a pen just for eggs.We had eggs every morning. My grandfather still plowed his garden with a mule and an old fashioned plow. No electric tractor for him. I can remember going out into the cotton fields with him and helping pick cotton. The prickly cotton branches make me think of him even today. I always loved visiting my cousin to live out in the country. It seemed like they made their own happiness. We played playhouse in an old chicken coop, climbed in the rafters of an old barn. And I shot my first gun acrossed an open field. I'm not sure if it's the times that have changed that allowed that simple life or if people on farms now still have it. Sometimes I think it would be interesting to find out.
ReplyDelete