Country kids get to experience a whole different set of life experiences that the townies are denied.
Aside from the privations of the outdoor privy and cold winter mornings, there were not too many
country life experiences I would rather have missed out on.
The smell of freshly mown red clover is hard to beat and the smell of freshly spread manure…. Well it just makes you appreciate that red clover even more.
That dip in the river after a long hot day hauling day. What could be more satisfying?
How about that first old time threshing bee? The break for dinner when for the first time you were
allowed to eat with the men. With three kinds of meat and at least four kinds of pie and they just kept passing the food with a hearty, “Have some more!” doing their best to see if they could stall you. After that meal you could barely move, but by suppertime you were right back up to the table.
How about that 4H trip to the bull stud farm where they collected the semen for the artificial insemination service. You kind of wondered how that was done until the technician dodged under the bull mounting the wooden cow and holding up a rubber vagina showed how that seed was collected. It was a very interesting piece of sex education until the technician explaining the operation lost his focus and the bull, off target, managed to slide up his sleeve and grease his elbow. Then it was just plain funny.
How about those early season sunburns when mother chased everyone outside to “Get some vitamin D, so you don’t get rickets”. That was obviously before skin cancer raised its ugly head and we’d have contests to see who could peel off the biggest patch of skin.
How about lying in a patch of wild strawberries and eating most of what you picked much to the disgust of your mother who was wanting to make a real strawberry shortcake. Fortunately you could depend on your sisters to be more diligent in their picking and not eating routine.
Of course there were the endless rows of spuds that needed planting, hoeing, hilling and then digging and storing. We complained mightily but dug right in when all the bounty was passed around the dinner table. Maybe there is enough country air left in our little towns to continue gardening traditions, but you can bet in most urban cultures, if folks had to grow their own… and I don’t mean electric lettuce… they would starve before the first year of the famine was over.
