I Love Barns

I absolutely love barns. Barns bring back memories of happy carefree days of my childhood. My Gramps had a farm with a big brown barn. He purchased three cows one for me, my sister, and our cousin. We gave our cows names and each time we were visiting our grandparents, we were on the farm feeding our cows and driving all over the pasture. We drove everything he had that would drive on that farm. If only those cows could talk, the stories they could tell.

When I was 12 years old, the neighbor kids, my sister and I spent many days each summer in the fields picking vegetables and strawberries. We spent a lot of time in the barn handing and stringing tobacco. The boys would pick the tobacco then drive the tractor up to the barn pulling a wagon load of tobacco behind. We would then unload it onto tables in the barn. If you were a hander, you would gather several pieces and stack them neatly together and hand to the stringer. The stringer would loop a string around the stems onto a board that would get hung up in the rafters of the barn to dry out. (Oh the trouble we could get into when we were all together.) From there it would get sold. We started about 6:30 a.m. and were done around 1:00 p.m. The farmers wife was a sweet southern lady and a wonderful cook. When the work was done, she would let us know that lunch was ready. We usually had the same meal each time we worked which consisted of fried chicken or country fried steak, creamed corn, fried okra, butter beans, squash, rice and country gravy and always, homemade biscuits with her homemade jelly. Her kindness in preparing this delicious feast for us was not truly appreciated until I was much older and realized the time and effort that was involved.Sadly, a few years ago, the farmer died on that farm. One of his cows charged him and he jumped on a fence and fell over backwards.

Ter-reck-ly,

Kathy