As a little girl, I always imagined that it would be wonderful to live on a farm.
I could picture myself in the wide-open spaces, surrounded by nature and animals. In my imagination, I would rise and shine with the dawn, scattering feed to the chickens that bobbed playfully around the house on my way to the well, where I would draw water to fill the trough for the cattle and sheep.
Then I would make my way to the barn, breathing in the sweet aroma of hay spilling out from the loft, and would hitch up my horse to plow the fields, my faithful dog chasing rabbits in the background. Hawks circled lazily overhead in the bright blue sky that rained just as much as my crops needed, no more and no less, and somewhere off in the distance, a friendly coyote howled.
Obviously, I was a city girl.
My grandfather, however, really did live on a farm, out near Philpot in the delightfully named community of Pleasant Ridge.
A couple of times during my childhood, I had the opportunity to spend a few days on the farm, but the reality of those visits did not exactly match my vision.
I did wake up early, and wandered through the fields while my grandmother prepared breakfast in her cheery kitchen. No cereal here! Breakfast was bacon or sausage or maybe both, eggs and biscuits, orange juice for kids, coffee for grown-ups.
Then she shooed me outside so she could clean up the breakfast dishes and get started on fixing lunch – I was just in the way – and I waved forlornly as Grandpa made his way to the barn, soon to disappear over the hill on his tractor, I guess to check on the corn in one field or the tobacco in another or the cows in the pastures behind the lake.
I walked rather desolately through the fields, and if there was a heavy dew, it soaked through my canvas sneakers. The farm dogs – Doxell and Shadow – had abandoned me to follow their one true master.
Occasionally, a pickup truck would rattle its way up the long, winding driveway, kicking up clouds of dust in its wake. It being summer, sometimes these visitors would have their own children in tow, but they were strangers to me and I to them, so we simply stared silently at one another while the adults talked, and then they went on their way.
Could those children have ever guessed that I was jealous of them?
The highlight of these week-long visits to the farm was the opportunity to go swimming in the cow pond. Mud (and who knows what else, but I can guess) squished between our toes as we waded tentatively out into the sun-warmed water, nervously moving away from any cows that approached the banks. We took along a cake of Ivory soap (it floats) and washed the stains from our feet as we limped out from the lake, first one foot, then the other.
Wednesday nights meant prayer meeting at the country church down the road, where Grandpa sometimes led the singing from the pulpit, his fine baritone voice ringing with authority as he extolled the virtues of bringing in the sheaves.
Only once a week was the television turned on. No “Mod Squad” or “Bewitched” here; instead, I sat silently as my grandparents chuckled at “Hee Haw.”
It was only years later that I realized my fanciful imagining of life on a farm had nothing to do with reality, but I was right about one thing: Kids who are blessed with knowing what farm life is – what it really is – are the luckiest kids in the world.
