My Early Memories Of My Grandfather's Farm

      Ours was a close-knit extended sort of family, as one of my grandparents owned a farm and greenhouse just one house away, and my other grandparents, a math professor and his wife, lived a mile down the road in the opposite direction.  My aunt, uncle, and two cousins lived next door.  It was a very stable and idyllic situation to grow up in.

    It was the Schmidt side of the family that owned the farm, and thus provided us with fresh vegetable produce, eggs, and milk and whose farm provided a diverse and favorite playground for us kids.   Their farm was a working farm with both crops in the fields and greenhouses, and livestock like cows, pigs, a mule, and chickens in the pens and pastures.  There were always a lot of interesting activities for us kids to see and participate in.  

    The menagerie of farm animals were a wonderful diversion by themselves.  We kids would be given exciting chores like feeding the chickens; which was fun, until one of the roosters started attacking my sister, whenever she went into the chicken yard.  

    Lily, the cow, provided the farm with milk (unpasteurized) for my grandparents and some of her bounty was always shared with our family.  As a youngster it was often my job to walk up to the farm and carry the glass quart or gallon jars of the milk, with the yellow cream floating on the top, back to our house before supper.   Even now, I still have a scar on the base of my right ring finger from a glass cut I received when I tripped on the path, falling, breaking the jar, and cutting the finger on a shard of glass, while carrying one of those quart milk bottles home.   

    As a young child I was never keen about drinking milk and I especially hated having to drink glasses of warm milk from the farm with its quarter inch layer of cream floating on the top.  When I complained about the cream, Mom would always just stir my glass of milk with a spoon so that the cream disappeared, eliminating the argument I made about drinking it.

    After eating meals at my grandparents, one of us kids were often given the task of carrying the slops (left over garbage) out to the pigpen, where we would dump the chunky, repulsive looking liquid mixture into the feeding trough, and then watch with fascination as the grunting porkers made pigs of themselves, slurping it down.

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