Many a town kid today may delight in weekends spent at their grandparents’ farms.
But, I have to confess that it’s not just city kids who relish such adventure. When I was a boy I found special delight, too, in trips to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm, though my home was really more a working farm than theirs.
The key word, there, was “working.” At home I had cows to milk, hay to rake and fence to fix. On Saturdays at Grandma’s all I had to do was play.
And what a playground it was.
The old barn had a hayloft as big as most houses, a huge door in the front peak where loose hay was once brought in, and the rail and hay fork still in place. Grandpa must have fixed it so we couldn’t drop the giant hook on our heads, but the rope still hung free for us to swing from one haystack to another, just like Tarzan swung from tree-to-tree on TV.
Had we been required to move it, we’d have surely complained; but, calling it play we reorganized tons of square bales of hay in forts and hideouts connected by a tunnel maze.
Of course, we had to be careful where we played. About half the old loft was riddled with holes, where leaks in the roof had rotted the pine floor. But, as kids, we knew every dangerous place, where to land and where not, when we swung from the rope off the hay to the floor.
I’ve no idea how old the barn was. Its timbers came from old railroad cars, and the concrete walls were made with creek gravel, not quarried rock.
When I was a born, old leather harness and horse collars still hung in a room that once was a corncrib; but, I doubt they’d been used since before my dad went off to war (and that seemed such a long time ago, but had been barely a decade or just over).
Before my grandparents drilled their new well, they pumped water a couple hundred yards up the hill from an old dug well in the holler. Of course, it was also downhill from the barn; but I never recall the water being tainted. I wouldn’t have thought of such things back then, but I imagine it simply wasn’t enough.
The well was at the head of a wet-weather stream, where in a deep pothole we found crawdads and perch, but only in spring. In summer, when we might have been tempted to shuck our clothes and go for a swim, it was dry as a bone. Swimming came later, when Uncle Johnny (11 months my senior) would hike to the Sac River with our fishing poles. I don’t remember us ever doing much swimming or fishing, just a whole lot of walking there and back.
Outside the back yard was a chicken house built of stone. Dad said he helped build it when he was a boy. Mom says we lived in it when I was a baby and houses were hard to find. I remember it as a chicken house, and Grandma’s “Dominecker” chickens on the roost. Like any kid, I liked gathering eggs; but, I didn’t care much for the chicken house smell. It was no place to play.
The woods was. We had woods at home, but not like the woods across from Grandpa’s place, where we cut hickory bows and hazel arrows, just like we imagined the Cherokees or Delaware used to do.
Grandma’s turkeys shed enough feathers for arrows and lances, and hay rope made a pretty good bowstring – good enough to propel an arrow through a cardboard box, which was all we ever shot.
Now, in all the childhood days I spent at my grandparents’ farm, I remember little work, and not much but play. From hayloft forts to Indian camps in the woods, it was a place of adventure and escape, not work or chores.
I got enough of those at home. Maybe it wasn’t so much a trip to the farm, but just a place to get away.
It was the same thing most of us are looking for today.
A former feature writer for Ozarks Farm and Neighbor, Jim Hamilton is a retired newspaper editor/publisher. Hamilton was reared on a small dairy farm in Dallas County, Mo. Contact Jim at [email protected].
