babies home

My sons have returned from their trip to Ireland. Joel reported that everything was wonderful. He is now looking into Masters programs. He would like to teach Math. I'm trying to tell him that the job market is for special education but he isn't sure that is his calling. He will substitute this year. I am just so thankful that he is happy. Josh is planning on leaving his electrical engineering job in Chicago and moving to Ireland to work for his great uncle on a dairy farm. Again. I'm thankful that he is independent and happy.

My fun working with the seed corn just gets better and better. I was in charge of re-tagging bags of corn. Taking off this years tags and putting on next years tags. same corn just new tags. but when others starting stepping on my toes I decided to do their job. Which is probbing. The bags of seed corn say things like 1493 kernals in bag. we I shove a poker in the bag and take about 50 the bag still stays the same and I put a sticker over the hole that says quality assurance. It should say I just stole some of your corn. then the corn is bagged and labeled and sent for testing. I probe about 1000 bags a day. I of course enjoy every opportunity. The directions say bag choice has to be random. so I spin myself in a circle and stabb the first bag I touch. The fork lift drivers enjoy watching me. Then when I have probbed say 30 bags from a batch. I have to stir the corn up. before I bag it. Again assuring that the sample is of all the bags. once I picked up a kernal from the floor I thought I had dropped and put it in my bucket. I heard a yell from across the warehouse. The man said I bastardized the whole lot and I had to start over. I reached in the bucket and threw the darn kernal back out. I'm sure I got the right one. New fork lift driver started today and they put him on my team for the day. He was a good worker As I talked to the bags of corn he asked if I was OK. I said I thought OK was a relative term. for and elementary teacher I'm only mildly crazy. As a warehouse worker I might me a little more crazy.

I went to see my mother today. There was a cat meowing in the corn field next to her house. A somewhat wild cat. I thought of the generations of kittens we had as children. I was always trying to make a pet out of every other creature I encountered.

My brothers would rattle the rafters in the barn and hit sparrows with a base ball bat. I would find the birds and nurse them back to health. I made pets out the farm animals from calves, pigs, my milk cow. Once or twice my farmer would give my father young lambs that whose mothers would not take them and we would bottle raise them. When I was 10 we got two day old lambs. We named them Mike and Mary Anne. I would spend the day with them and they had full run of the yard. They followed us everywhere on the farm. They were still quite young when the tornado of 1968 hit our farm and the villiage of Wapella.

We has regular storm drills in school. They did help us prepare. When the rain began to fall that day I was about a quarter mile from home. I was at the end of the creek. It was really a beginning of a creak as on our land it was field drainage that came out of two large tiles that was the beginning of the creek that flowed across my parents 40 acres and on across other fields to the larger creeks and rivers I'm sure. I have floated on an intertube for maybe 5 miles as a child with a duck but that is a different story.

I was playing with the lambs in the pasture that bordered both sides of the creek. When rain began the lambs were frightened. It was not unusal for me to travel around the farm. I had the run of the farm and for the most part tried to stay on the 40 acres. It took me a while to get the lambs to the house I put them in the shed and hurried to the house. The sky was looking bad and I hurried to the living room. My mother was at a neighbors wall papering. Mom was famous in the neighborhood for wall papering. Wallpaper was a cheap way of making a rental house look clean and new. It also hid all kinds of problems. Dad was in the farming away from the house.

When I got to the living room I found my sibling in a circle on the floor. Rita was in charge. I sat with the group for a bit Then when the sky and our world turned green I ran for the basement. everyone followed. Shortly after we got to the basement the living room window blew through the house. My sisters wer great entertainers and kept up occupied as the wind blew and the house shook. In the basement we only had small windows which we could see that the storm raged. When the storm ended we knew only that we survived My brother Dale went out to find distruction everywhere The trees were damaged. Fortunately none of the main building on the farm were dammaged. Dale came back to the basement to tell us that Mike and Mary Anne were up in a tree. I screamed and demanded details. It was all a joke. one I did not enjoy. The lambs were fine. I spent the night with the lambs. One of the buildings that was moved was the building that we kept our new chicks in. Dad usually bought 200 chicks and we raised them and had the hens for eggs and the roosters for meat. So soon sisters were returning for the chicken yard with laundry baskets filled with chicks. This was my speciality working with enjured birds. we got a heat lamp and lots of newspaper and soon the basement was converted into a brooder house. We lost about half of the chicks but I was allowed to have 100 bet chickens in the basement until they put the brooder house back on its foundation. I was determined to teach the chicks many tricks. I did get them all to running when they saw me but none learned to dance. The lambs and I had a wonderful summer and they were sold in the fall. The tornado left destruction everywhere but we had summer work picking up rubble. I was short for my age but my brothers would put me on the tractor. I couldn't reach the peddles so they wired 2 X 4 on the peddles. It was an old tractor and the gas was next to the steering wheel and I could opperate the clutch and brake. They also wired me to the seat to keep me from bouncing out. The system worked quite well until one day I was traveling down Carl Springs road which crossed Highway 51. I was heading from the farm to Jim Town which of course was not a real town only an area who earned it's name because several men named Jim lived in the area. As I approached the highway pulling a rack wagon I slammed my foot on the clutch the 2 x 4 slid out of place and I could not reach the clutch so slammed on the breaks the breaks were separate for left and right wheels but licked together I sweaved out of control. As I corrected I headed for the highway. I held my breath released the brake and went across the highway. two cars were heading for me but were able to avoid an accident. When I got to the bottom of the hill. I cut the engine. Left the tractor wagon and load where it was and walked 5 miles home. When I got home I told my father I would not drive the tractor again and I didn't. My father always called me the emotional one. He rarely questioned me when he knew I was upset. He knew that usually he could say something was too difficult for me and I would kill myself to make it possible. Like the time I moved 200 - 50 lb bales of hay from one side of the barn to the other just to prove I could. It didn't work with the tractor. Fortunately for me my younger brother Darrell had already grown bigger than me and he loved driving the tractor. I'd rather drag sheets of metal across the field than drive the stupid tractor.