Boys...

Life on the farm is certainly different than city life.  A prerequisite for being a farm kid is a healthy imagination--which leads to activities that may or may not be so healthy... or safe as Joe explains.

From Joe:

There is no logic reason, or limit to what boys can do when they get together. We can’t explain why it is so amusing to build a Catapult with a 2X4, a rock fulcrum, a stray farm cat, and a bail of hay being tossed off the top of the ten wheeler overshot. I can’t tell you why we are curious how much weight a cow eyeball can hold before it explodes, after it is extracted using precision surgical tools like old timer pocket knives and pliers.

We had a common thread of unity because these things made normally boring farm life exciting and new, and we were only limited by our creativity and the school of hard knocks, like not to pee on an oil fire, or blow up toilets with M80s. Yet there are some things which normal people out of respect for the dead would give any creature a proper burial, but to these boys, I won’t name them (Sam, Joe, Steve, Aaron.) When an animal dies not much is sacred, especially when it comes to mean old roosters which would peck your eyes out if given the opportunity.

On one joyous occasion one of the roosters deceased, (I swear it was an accident.) but no one buried this old miserable bird. Instead we suddenly found joy in using the rotting poultry as a genius tool of pranks as long as it was staying together. I think it went hidden in a bucket of grain once, and tied to a entry way to the grain shed, and I may have waited for Sam for some time to plant the rotting bird in his chest, I can’t quite remember the details, but Sam might. I forgot about what I did, and life went on.

Life went on and the chicken got even more rotten. Over the smell of manure and cows I could always smell it when I went to feed my cows. I would smell it, then I would find it. Work that summer was hard for young boys who had ADD, and an imagination, but the cows had to be fed. The stacks were always close to the mangers and Ross would not let us toss the bails off the side of the stack into the manager, we had to peel them off the front and carry them back between the manger and the stack.

To save time I would usually carry two bails back at a time, one bouncing off the front of my right leg, and another bouncing off of my back left leg, then I would shimmy between the stack and the manger to get to feed the cows.

One day I was doing my shimmy on the 3^rd manger and I got all the way to the cow trough and suddenly I could smell something. I had smelled it before. Like something had died and had set out in the sun for several days. The chicken. No sooner had I identified the smell, the mass of feathers, claws beak, and worm infested flesh came crashing down on my head. Sam had made a direct hit from on top of the hay stack. Mission accomplished.

I decided from that point to call a truce because I knew Sam was not scared to see my dead chicken and raise me one dead cow falling from the sky. I think I got over pretty fast considering it felt like that thing hit me at terminal velocity.

As I think back on those days there was nothing in my life I have experienced that has been as pure and as fun or as hard as those days growing up on the farm. People from there never forget where they come from. They work hard, pray hard, and play hard. Brothers, sisters and friends. We all go our different directions in life, yet when we come together after years we just sort of pick up where we left off, and that is priceless.