Why I Love a Farm!

On Saturday I had an opportunity to attend a hugely enormous grand opening of a new barn! Whoopee! Right?!? Check this out...my Dad and baby brother, Scott, had it built to make room for 700 more cows! It's measurements are crazy! 118' x 484', and is 40' tall at the peak! A football field is 160' x 360'. Photos below are during the construction phase, but you will get the idea! The other buildings are the original farm with 2 other barns added within the last few years. They provided a huge pork BBQ and invited the whole town, topped off with square dancing in the afternoon & DJ for the evening. So much catching up to do and not enough hours in the day! It was so much fun and I loved seeing people who I have not seen since I was knee high to a grasshopper! I will always be a farm girl at heart! Instead of a fairy tale life, mine was all about farm life! I grew up not only with great parents, but the best grandparents, aunts & great-aunts, (I want to say uncles, but really it was my great-uncle Robert I loved the most!), and cousins(1st, 2nd, 3rd & so on)...we had the best life...and stories...

Here you can see how big it is in comparison to the actual farm!

Look at how small the trucks along the building look!

I have got to share with you how much fun we had growing up on a farm & we only watched TV on Saturday mornings and Atari wasn't invented until I was in 6th grade! We got to run in fields and pastures (mostly unsupervised), catch crayfish and tadpoles in the creek, walk through the glen to see the heart-shaped pool (actually, I still love to do this the best), ride mopeds, 3-wheelers (before they were determined to be unsafe) & snowmobiles...one time we had a million of us (ok, ten or so) on a Grizzly 4-wheeler...it was acrobatic genius on our part! We always spent all summer in Gram's pool(I hate swimming in ponds...gives me the heebie geebies) & we were always annoyed she let everyone and their brother (literally) invade "our" pool! It's a miracle any of us "younguns" survived, since our uncle always tried to drown us! I learned how to square dance, play pitch, pinochle & canasta by the age of 10...I considered myself a professional, but my grampa used to pretend he wasn't annoyed anytime he had to have one of us kids as a partner! We built forts and tunnels in the hay mound, painted an old chicken coop lavender(to make myself a nice place), played hide 'n seek in corn fields(now that is fun!), stepped in cow poop (that's why I'm so tall), rode on the tractor with my Dad (I can still feel the wind on my face (Glory!)...we never went slow...except for once when Dad had to stop when my brother fell off!)...we used to ride in the back of trucks...sometimes with the tailgate down & once I was brave enough to touch my sneaker on the road...that was too cool! Kids don't try that at home! We had a brawl with my cousins once (actually I think it was everyone against me, they sent the youngest to be on my team...big help that was!) at Gram's with grasshoppers and spiders in green food coloring! We were so rotten! We had our share of "accidents" too...Steve took a ride on the Big Wheel under a barbed wire fence and sliced open his neck, Scott broke every bone in his body before the age of 8 & then decided to out do himself by nearly being crushed in a tractor mishap, Val tried, unsuccessfully, to ride her bike down a hill at 100mph and ate dirt instead. I've stepped on nails & even caught my eyeball on a nail & still have the scar...I could continue, but frankly I'm sure you don't want to read all day! Back then my dad's cousin Roberta was my idol...she wore blue eyeshadow and called her car Bessie (come to think of it was the same color as her eyeshadow)...i can even remember what the steering wheel looked like, because I thought it was very cool how she placed her hands on it while driving. She was so glamorous! Forget Miley Cyrus!

Anyway, we always knew the meaning of hard work...and the importance of family, especially extended family...I am so blessed! Thanks for listening!