This is the week between the holidays. As a kid, I didn’t have school and could play with my Christmas presents. I think of the year I was seven and Santa made his last visit.
We celebrated on Christmas Eve with Uncle Hookie, Aunt Frannie, Doris and Sis coming for supper and gifts. Mom was busy preparing the festive meal so I took her place helping Dad do the evening milking. While I was in the barn, our house was one of St. Nick’s first stops.
The ‘big kids’ at school had been telling me Santa Claus was my folks. I didn’t want to believe them, but late that afternoon, I had no choice. While I was crawling around my parents’ bedroom floor hunting for my left shoe so I could go with Dad, I glimpsed a sled under their bed. I found my shoe, kept quiet about what I saw and hurried outside.
When I returned to the house, Santa had stashed the sled under the Christmas tree. The wooden surface atop the shiny, metal runners was painted bright red with DODGER in black letters down the middle and a tow rope fastened to the front. I loved sliding down the hill behind the barn, but not the trek pulling my sled back to the top.
One morning, I was in the barn with Dad while he did chores. He shoveled the manure from the gutter into the spreader that was hooked behind the tractor and parked beside the doorway to the cow yard. When he finished, he pulled away and stopped in front of the barn’s walk-in door. He hollered, “Hook your sled rope to the back of the spreader and you can ride along behind.” As we went down a small hill, I dragged my feet so I didn’t slide too close to the smelly spreader. He stopped in the corner of last year’s oat field. I disconnected my sled and waited by the fence line. He unloaded the spreader to fertilize next year’s alfalfa crop. He then stopped so I could reattach and ride back to the house. It was a treat because I could ride and not have to climb the hill.
While I was growing up, I never thought I was in peril and I don’t think my parents did either. In 1966, when Ken climbed down off a tractor and into a
Winnebago County squad car, we were surprised to learn statistics show that farming is more dangerous than policing. Looking back, many of the things we routinely did on the farm were probably unsafe.
What did you do while growing up that would now be considered dangerous?