Bunny hugging
Memories Are Made of These
Each summer, when I was a kid, my family made a trip from our home in Washington, DC to Culpeper, Virginia. It was the place my father had grown up and the home of relatives, that went by such names as Cousin Abby, Aunt Sal, and Cousin Nall.
I rode my first horse on one of those farms. I watched a chicken go from the barnyard to the frying pan within a half hour. I ate canned whole hog sausage, picked apples, milked my first (and last) cow, and stepped in a manure pile more than once. I sat on a big porch with fly paper hanging from the ceiling as I helped to string bushels of green beans in the summer heat. All those activities were so foreign to me as a city kid.
Ahhh . . . .
Ol’ MacDonald Had a Farm
This past weekend when friends visited from New York City, along with their four children, I relived some of my childhood farm adventures.
Since our place in Rolla is now more of a weekend getaway than a working farm, we took the visitors to a few local farms, where they could see and hold a variety of small animals
Feeding the chickens
“Baa, baa black sheep, have you any wool?”
A well-fed porker
Pig, pond, and playmates
An albino rabbit with pink eyes
Puppy love
Lunch time for a litter of ten golden doodles.
Rachel shows that puppy love isn’t just for kids.
Fish were jumping and easy to catch.
The catch of the day: catfish from the farm pond. Actually, the kids caught six.
After “farming” it was time for a jump at Fugitive Beach. Located several miles from our farm, the water hole is a creative use of an old rock quarry.
We worked up quite an appetite, which Austin handled nicely with hand-tossed pizza for the outdoor cob oven.
The cob oven gets up to 900 degree and cooks pizza quickly. Which was good, because we were hungry by day’s end. Paul kept us awake with an evening of fireworks.
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