Easter Fun!

So, Easter is upon us and we all know what that means. My one time of the year to hang out with my Peeps.    

 

 

I'm sure my sister has long forgotten this, but my favorite activity around Easter would be to bite the heads off the Peeps and leave the bodies on my sister's bed. I'm pretty sure she thought it was really funny. That's what good little brothers do best - entertain their big sisters! Mary Lou had a room to herself, while my older brother Alan and I shared a room. I know when he went off to college, it was great to have a room to myself for 4 years before I left as well. 

One of the mistakes I made after growing up and in later years was not spending enough time asking my mom what I did all day.  We lived in the country and when we were older, we could ride our bikes into town to play baseball, but for many years my life revolved around our 5 acres and the 88 acres next door that was my Grandpa Armstrong's farm. I have memories of my misspent youth, but they are hardly enough to fill the summer. Now I could barely cover a week of the "What I did last summer" essay that was a staple of the first day at Noble Elementary School (I think teachers needed time to get themselves organized, too). I remember playing tennis on the highway with Alan. We had no net and Route 116 had a 65 mph speed limit, so you had to keep your eyes and ears open, but it was a game we really enjoyed (and traffic heading north out of town was infrequent).  We played a lot of baseball, hitting flyballs to catch and spending hours trying to break our record at the Double Play game - throw a grounder to Alan, he fields it and throws it to me, I throw it back to him, Double Play! unless we threw the ball away and had to start counting again. I don't remember what our record was, but I think we got into the thirties without an error once. I was four years younger than Al, and I'm sure I was the source of most of the errors, but I don't remember Al getting very mad at me that often. Maybe that's the way good big brothers are supposed to be. Our yard was very bumpy - it was quite a feat to scoop up a ground ball without making an error.   

I remember spending what seemed like an inordinate amount of time in the garden, pulling weeds and hoeing. Our family garden was 30 feet wide and 100 feet long. Yes, it was huge. My most vivid memory is of walking down the rows of corn and coming to a complete stop for no apparent reason, then having your eyes refocus to short distance and realizing that a garden spider  

was sitting in a web three inches in front of your nose. With their black and yellow bodies, they blended in with the corn stalks. My, that was fun. We also had chores at Grandpa's house 200 yards down the road. Unfortunately Grandpa raised chickens. We fed and watered the chickens and collected eggs. When you are little, chickens are pretty intimidating. They peck at your hand when you try to pull the egg out from under them and like to fly at you in the yard. Believe me, when it is time to have fried chicken dinner, we weren't unhappy to see the chicken flopping around the yard with its head chopped off. Served her right, was our motto as we put new band-aids on our fingers. Although plucking chickens is a disgusting activity. We also had baling duty when the hay was cut in the field. The hay baler spit out the bale neatly tied up in twine string - we had to carry it to the back of the wagon and stack it with the others.   

We had a metal hook we used to grab hold of the bales as they came back from the baler onto the wagon and you had to stack them carefully so that they didn't come tumbling off the wagon as the wagon followed the tractor around the field. I remember wearing long sleeved shirts in 90 degree temperatures because the hay would scratch up your arms really badly as you carried the bale.   





When the wagon was full, Grandpa would drive back to the barn and we would use the conveyor belt to run the bales up to the hay loft.  







The best part of hay baling season was that we ate lunch at Mr. Nelson's house behind the fields. Mr. Nelson was the official farmer of Grandpa's land. He had lots of equipment and a much larger farm, so he had a deal with Grandpa to farm his fields for a cut of the take. Mostly Grandpa drove the tractor and smoked his pipe. But Mrs. Nelson was the classic farm wife. When we went to lunch after baling from 8 to 11:30, she had more food than an army could eat. Always meat and potatoes (and gravy), bread, corn, beans - the classic groaning table full of food. And always two or three pies to finish the meal. If you didn't like the mince pie, there was apple pie and berry pie as well. (John, you want ice cream with that, don't you?) I think I would have paid to work at Nelson's just for the lunches. I have no recollection what we got paid for working, but I'm sure it was minimal. It kept us out of our Mom's hair for a couple of weeks.  Maybe Al or Mary Lou remember more. I hope so. Next time we get together, I'm looking for hours upon hours of stories. And I think Nate and Mike are, too. They might even like to hear the "riding the sheep when Grandpa's not looking" story again.