Old Farm Memories

[Bird]

dieselalles, you do bring back lots of memories. I've turned the crank on the ice cream freezer many a turn. And while I never broke a bone, I've had the steering wheel jerked out of my hand on the old John Deere L and even on my 1995 Kubota B7100 without power steering.

And I've eaten lots of persimmons; two trees on my grandparents' place in town, as well a others. Did you ever see a Japanese persimmon? Huge fruit compared to most and I've only seen one. Dad was real proud of that Japanese persimmon tree.

And smoking grape vines . . . I've sure done that. Of course to get the smoke through it, you had to suck so hard your eyeballs would sink in. Then I heard that you could make a cigar by rolling dry corn silk in a piece of a brown paper bag. So I tried that. Now having smoked nothing but grape vine in the past, I assumed you had to really suck hard, so I lit the match and sucked as hard as I could. My corn silk cigar burned all the way down in about half a second and I figured the fire cauterized all my internal parts at least down to the bottom of my stomach.

 

[dieselalles]

Bird, I've never heard of a Japanese persimmon. Does it taste the same as the wild variety?

On smoking grape vines, we tried corn cobs and this and that. I do remember the grape vine smoke burned like heck if you were able to suck any through the stem. And yep, you're head just about caved in trying!!!!

Here's another memory. Our road to the house was half gravel, half dirt. The dirt part came up to a big oak tree and made a circle around it. In the summer that road would get pretty dusty. When we were little kids, we used to drag a hoe around and make roads in the dirt, build stick houses and push our toy cars and tractors around on those roads. And my teenage uncle, whenever he came up to the house, delighted in hitting that road at full speed and wiping out any infrastructure that we had built up. Made us mad as heck.

But my uncle was a pretty good joe. He and my dad rigged up a tire swing on one of the many huge oak trees. It was high up and out on a huge branch on a tree that was at the crest of a small hill. So when you got that swing going real big, you could swing out over that hill and felt like you were at 30,000 ft. Grandma's heart would skip a beat whenever she saw us doing that.

And that brings back another memory. I was at my Grandma's and my uncle had a date and and I wanted to go along since he let me go on a hay ride a couple weeks before. He was a dressed up wearing a suit. And of course he said no and of course, I wasn't happy. I wanted revenge. So I crouched down by his 1959 Ford with a garden hose and waited for him. And when he came up along side the car, I let him have it. Boy was he mad. And he almost caught me but I was able to get behind grandma to keep him from killing me. I used to go to the field with him on a regular basis but it took a couple of weeks before he calmed down. I just can't understand why he got so mad!

 

[Bird]

The Japanese persimmon looked and tasted much like the wild ones we were accustomed to, but the fruit was gigantic compared to the wild ones, 2 to 3 inches in diameter. Unfortunately, ours did not last long. We were burning some brush and while Dad and I went to the other side of the property to get more brush, he told my two little brothers to watch the fire and call us if it spread into the grass. Well, they got to playing and didn't notice the grass fire that spread under the Japanese persimmons. And two little boys sure got a whipping.

 

[billbill1]

My parents had 3 pear trees, and 2 persimmon trees in the yard where I grew up. We always tricked (only worked once) kids into taking a bite out of a green persimmon. That was the original pucker factor that I can remember. We also had Gooseberrys, they could be very sour as well. My parents also had a well on the property and we were used to the taste of the iron in the water. I hated drinking "city water" is what we called it. Any water with clorine tasted terrible. Also, remember the term "Sunday pants"? You had to get them changed before you were allowed to go out to play. Eating mulberrys too, I remember eating them and green apples. There were many dirt roads in NE Kansas when I grew up too, as in zero gravel. These had grass and weeds growing down the middle of them amny times and you just stayed off of them when muddy. I also attended a one room school for the first 3 grades.

 

[dieselalles]

I tried a green persimmon only once!!! Talk about turning you inside out!

Where we lived was down in a river bottom on a long, lonely gravel road. But we had lots of dirt roads too. And every time we heard a car or truck coming down the road, we'd run and look, cause most of the time either they were coming to see us or they were lost.

As a kid, I spent a good part of my life barefoot. I remember walking down many dusty hot dirt roads feeling my toes sink into the hot dust. And I also remember a couple times stepping on a "Velvet Ant" in the dust. All I can say is that those suckers really REALLY hurt!!! Red velvet ant or "cow killer"

Speaking of bugs in the dust, we also had a lot of antlions. They would dig a small cone-shaped hole in the dust and bury themselves at the bottom, waiting for an ant or other insect to come along and fall into the cone and slide down into their jaws. And of course, it was great fun to catch ants or small insects and put them in the cone to watch the fight. Here's a little bit on Antlions.

Speaking of ants and hot summer days, ever turn a magnifying glass loose on a colony of ants? Or burn your initials in a board?

Ever get caught in a dust devil on a hot dusty afternoon? We'd run and try to get in the middle of one just for fun. Here's some Dust Devils from out west. Our's in Tennessee were only about half that size. When I was stationed out in Utah, I remember I purposely hit a dust devil in my pickup truck just for the fun but it turned into terror. That dang thing almost turned me over!!!

 

[Cliff_Johns]

I remember running full tilt through the fields bare-foot, dodging cow floppers being a lot of fun. Weird huh? Still, trying to avoid them made for an entertaining game. It was pretty hard to miss all of them.

Games were different on a farm weren't they?

We'd also run full speed in the newly plowed field trying to keep our balance running diagonal across the direction of the plowing.

Hay bale tunnels. Working on Christmas day. Amish neighbors helping us rebuild our barn. Going to get the cows for milking -- why were they always at the other end of the field? Being told to hide in the house when the bull got out. Lugging buckets of milk to the bulk tank.

Cliff