Walking with Dad

Every year about this time, I head for the mountain for a week with my family and doing a little hunting. My Dad and I traipse all over the old farm where I grew up, supposedly looking for our furred quarry. Often times we just look over the old place and remember.



We inevitably work our way over to the far corner of the farm, where the crows alight in the tree's and notify all creatures great and small of our presence there. We don't mind, we like the crows and watch their antics with awe. The far corner of the farm is the most inaccessible part of the property, and it is here that unwary passersby report strange happenings. People witness everything from Ol' Fon, the goat man, to catching a fleeting glimpse of a mountain lion. Dad and I usually see sign of the big, lumbering bear which makes its home in this part of the farm.

To get to the far corner of the farm, we walk through the enormous open fields, long ago cleared of rocks. These rocks were hand-picked by countless hands. Gigantic piles of rocks can be found at regular intervals throughout the fields. We remember our great-grandfathers, Fon Lawrence and Alfred Kile, who worked this land. We know that their hands toiled this farm into prosperity. It is good to remember.



In between the fields there is a low place, an almost holler that hasn't quite made it there. In this sheltered spot, an apple orchard was planted generations ago. Here, the fierce mountain winds don't reach, and it is noticably warmer than on the hilltops on each side of the almost holler. The apple orchard still produces though it has been years since it has been tended to, only now the deer and other wildlife enjoy the harvest. We still find a few late season heritage apples still clinging to the tree, which we pick and eat. The apple have a wonderful flavor and we comment how these apple taste so much better than those old hybrid things that we are forced to purchase in the grocery store these days. We recall some of the old ways and try to remember more.



Further up on the mountain, in the highest meadows, just below the jutting out of the North Mountain rocks, there is a little glen too far above the frost line to produce agriculturally but still fertile. It is here that the tree's grow to enormous heights, and it gives the impression that you are walking through forests of yesteryear, before they were logged off to fill the coffers of some far-off corporation. Probably only the inaccessibility of these forest giants saved them from the axe. They are quite a sight to see, some of these behemoths would take 7 or 8 men, linking hands with arms outstretched, to reach around them. Dad and I talk about what a terrific crash this forest giant must have made when it fell to the ground. We wonder if it was old age or a great storm that brought down this King from his forest crown. It must have been huge, because the tree's around it still haven't managed to reach the size of other tree's nearby, undoubtedly their growth was suppressed by the massive crown of the giant. We try to remember when all of the forest in these hills rivaled these remnants of history.



Finally, as we start to walk off the mountain, we see this lone tree stump in a grown over meadow. Apparently cut down a few years back, this hollow stump is now the home of a tree gnome. What? You don't believe in tree gnomes? haven't you heard, the hills of my home are magical! All we have to do is remember.

Jack and Jenny

I remember when I was growing up on the farm that we had two old donkey’s, a jack and a jenny, which we gave the ever-original donkey names of Jack and Jenny. We only used them to plow up the garden in the springtime so most of the time they pretty much just wandered about the farm whenever and wherever they pleased. I remember they were inseparable, and they would stand for hours along the fence line out by the house and just nuzzle one another. Being meaner than a striped-eyed snake, I’d sometimes get so annoyed by them that I'd sneak away from everyone and throw rocks at Jack and Jenny just to get them to move. They’d just look at me with those big ol' sad donkey eyes and walk off to a more secluded location where they’d again nuzzle each other.


Cows on the farm.

Nobody ever knew where Jack and Jenny came from, they were on the farm when we moved there several years before. Mom and Dad asked the man who owned the farm about to how old Jack and Jenny were, and he said he didn’t know. He said he was 45 years old and from the time he was a kid, he always remembered Jack and Jenny being there. I also remember in the building out from the house, near where we had a doghouse for our Saint Bernard named Tuffy, there was hanging on the wall two old leather harnesses. The leather was cracked and the metal tarnished but I recall that someone, probably my granddad, decided to oil up the leather and clean up the tarnished metal so we could use the harnesses on Jack and Jenny. Well, when they were cleaned up, the metal turned out to be brass and boy did those harnesses ever shine. Even I realized just how pretty Jack and Jenny were in those harnesses, to me they seemed to step a little higher and seem a bit more regal whenever they wore them.


The building where the harnesses were found was near here.

But like I said, Jack and Jenny led a pretty good life on the farm, but Lord could they ever get on your nerves with the incessant nuzzling of each other. It was day in and day out, every time you'd see them, they’d just be standing around nuzzling each other. I remember complaining about them to my Granddad, and he would just tell me, “They’re old. It’s hard to tell how long they’ve been here. Just let 'em be.” They weren’t any fun to aggravate anyway so aside from the occasional thrown rock, I typically ignored them. That is until the one day when we found Jenny laying dead in the road. Jack was standing beside of her and was nuzzling her.

Well as you might imagine, moving a dead donkey is a chore. Whenever a large animal would die on the farm, we’d get the tractor and using a chain, we’d drag the carcass back into the woods to an out of the way location where the foxes and possums and buzzards would clean it up. We never buried the large animals, probably because have you ever tried to bury a cow or a donkey? But it just so happened that the part of the road that Jenny died in was in part of the road that we couldn’t get around with the tractor. And to get to the place back in the woods where we dragged the dead carcasses to, we had to go down this road. But it was blocked. The road was narrow there, and one side dropped into the holler and the other side was a steep hillside so there was no way to get around it. My granddad thought he could drive the tractor over Jenny but us kids wouldn’t hear of that, so he had to drive the tractor all the way to the other end of the farm, then down the main road to the gate at the end of the farm road that led up into our farm…and back to the spot the road where Jenny lay dead. It was about a 4 mile trip to go around the farm just to return back to nearly the exact same spot that you had just left.


The old farm road.

But that done, a chain was quickly hooked to Jenny’s carcass and it was dragged back into the far corner of the farm woods. Jack closely followed along behind, head hanging low the whole time. Of course, we felt sorry for the old feller, but to us kids, this was prime entertainment so we followed along behind Jack and the tractor and thus became a makeshift funeral procession for a dead donkey.

After reaching a secluded spot back in the wood to leave the carcass, it was quickly unchained and left there. A few of the kids jumped on the tractor for the return trip, and the rest of us walked back. But everyone noticed that Jack was not accompanying us back home, he just remained there beside of Jenny’s carcass, nuzzling her.


The far corner of the farm woods.

The next morning, Jack didn’t show up for his morning bucket of oats, so we all figured he was still back in the woods with Jenny’s carcass. Mom told us to take the bucket of oats back to him and let him eat, and she told us to get a halter and lead him up to the pond for a drink of water. She reminded us to be gentle with Jack because as she put it "ol’ Jack is probably going to worry hisself to death." Well, us kids took off up through the meadow by the house, which was a shortcut to the far corner of the farm woods, and we made our way back to the spot where we figured Jack would be. Sure enough, we found him standing there beside of Jenny’s now bloating carcass, still nuzzling her to get up. We hollered for Jack to come and eat, and we waved the bucket of oats in the air for him to see. Jack turned to look at us, and even took a couple of steps toward us, but then he turned back to Jenny’s carcass, nuzzled her, and then just collapsed. We then took off running to him, hollering like a pack of banshee’s, but as we found out when we reached him, Jack was dead.


The old farmhouse.

We ran home and told Mom what had happened, and she didn’t really believe us, I reckon she figured that Jack probably just fell over from exhaustion or something. But she and Granddad got in the truck and drove back to the far corner of the farm woods, where she discovered that Jack was indeed dead, and he had fell right beside of Jenny. Mom was quick to point out to everyone how Jack and Jenny’s muzzles were touching. Mom stated matter-of-factly that Jack had grieved himself to death, and she commented that old people are like that too. She told us that when an old man or an old woman dies after they have been married for a long time, the other one would soon follow them to the grave. She continued with how it just seemed like old people can’t get along without each other, and that they seem to lose their will to live. Then she looked back at Jack and Jenny and sadly said, “Jack just didn't want to live without Jenny. Well anyway, they are better off now.”

A Handful of Pinto Beans

Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve always wanted to be a farmer. I can’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t drawn to the soil as if by some unseen power. At an early age, I was told that I had a green thumb and many's the time that people would ask me to plant their gardens, bushes, etc. because they said, “If anybody can get them to grow, Matthew can.”

Milkweed Ladies on the Mallow Farm.

The very first thing that I ever remember planting was a handful of pinto beans. I remember Mom was looking over a bag of store-boughten pinto beans that she was getting ready to cook (looking over them I’m sure you know, means that she was sorting through them and picking out cracked beans and the occasional pebble.) Well, she had a few beans picked out that were unsuitable to be cooked and I asked her if I could have them. She said that I could, but not to eat them because raw beans will give you a stomachache. I said that I wouldn’t eat them, but that I was going to plant them. It was early spring then, way too early to be planting anything on the mountain, but Mom told me to go ahead and plant them but to plant them in the corner of the garden (she told me to put them in the corner because she knew I wouldn’t let them plow it up after I planted the beans, even though they had little to no chance of growing). Well, I remember I went out and poked a hole in the ground with my pointer finger, and dropped a bean into the cold soil. I covered them up the some dirt and I repeated this until I had all of the broken and misshapen pinto beans planted. I checked on them several times that first day, and occasionally over the next few days, but I soon lost interest in waiting to see the first sprouts of the beans that I was just sure would soon pop through the soil. A few weeks later when the garden was plowed up in preparation for the spring planting, Mom noticed that there were five little bean plants growing in the corner of the garden. She called me over and showed them to me, and of course there never was a bean plant that ever looked so good as the ones that I had grown. Everyone was shocked that the plants had grown from the cracked pintos that had been sorted out of a store-boughten bag of pinto beans!

We tended to the beans that spring and they were getting up pretty good in size when my family decided to move out of Johnson Holler to over across the mountain to the Mallow Farm. The main reason was because my brother Jason had started to school the year before and Dad would drive him over North Fork Mountain every day to catch the school bus in Monkeytown, and this fall I would be starting to Kindergarten, so Mom and Dad figured it’d be better if we lived on the same side of the mountain as where we’d be attending school rather than risking the trip across the mountain every day all winter. The Mallow Farm was also closer to Dad’s work, it was only about a mile from the gate of the farm whereas Johnson Holler was about 15 miles. The third, but not the least important reason for moving out of Johnson Holler was because we wouldn’t have to pay rent. I remember rent at the old house in Johnson Holler was $50 a month, plus you had to supply your own buckets to catch the water that leaked through the roof when it rained. This was so the water wouldn’t rot out the floors (yes, the house was that good!). But on the Mallow Farm, there was no rent but we did have to tend to the farm. It seemed like a good deal to all of us, we got the run of a 585-acre farm just for taking care of it. I suppose another reason why we moved to the farm was that my Grandmaw Henry had just passed away and Mom and Dad were taking care of five of Dad’s siblings, of which the youngest was just 3 years older than my brother Jason and the Mallow Farm was more conducive to raising a passel of “heatherns” as we were frequently called, than most anywhere else they could think of.

So that was the long way around of telling you that I never got to harvest those first beans that I ever planted. We moved out of Johnson Holler early that summer, and had to leave the old garden behind. I’m sure the deer and groundhogs had a field day with it. Over the years I have often wondered if those pinto beans ever amounted to anything.

Germany Valley...my home.

After moving to the farm, we have plenty of ground to tend to. Since Mom and Dad were raising all of us kids then, our family garden was easily 2 acres in size, one acres of which was planted in potatoes. I remember there were plenty of “garden suppers” as we called them, suppers where everything we had came out of the garden. I don’t ever remember going hungry though. We also raised hogs, chickens, sheep, ducks, guineas, cows and a horse. The sheep, cows and the one old horse were owned by the man who owned the farm but we tended to them the same as we did our own.

We only saw the owner about once a month, if that, except during haying season, during which time he would be over every day cutting this or that hayfield. I remember that he had two teenage sons who were smitten with my Aunts who lived with us then. They were all about the same age, and every day for lunch they’d come over to the house to visit. They said they came for some cool spring water, but they wasn’t fooling anybody, they was a-tryin’ to court my aunts. Nothing ever amounted to their advances, Mom said that the girls were too young to be interested in boys, even though the girls were the same age as the boys. Mom always told the girls not to be a farmer’s wife, because they would work you to death and they’d find themselves broke down with a passel of kids before they was 40. I find it ironic now just how picky Mom was for us all, we really didn’t have a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of, but she always expected us to do better for ourselves. From where I’m sitting now, I’d have thought she’d have welcomed one of my aunts marrying up with the farmer’s sons, but she never did. But I reckon it goes back to the days when our family had money, and although the “uppity” customs that went along with the old ways got passed on down to us, the money didn’t. My granny always said we was “poor genteel”.

Late Autumn on the Mallow Farm

We might have been poor as church mice but there were things we done that were atypical of our neighbors in a similar financial predicament, for example, we always had to eat everything with a fork, finger foods were just unacceptable and were considered beneath us…my mother still won’t eat a sandwich! All these years later, I’m still guilty of eating everything with a fork, or at least I have to have a fork in my hand while I’m eating, even if I don’t use it. Another thing was we always had to have clean sheets and pillowcases on our beds. We knew a lot of people who were as poor as we were who didn’t have sheets or pillowcases, and we just thought that was awful. The ones we had might have been worn out, but by crackies we had them and used them! Another thing was our shoes had to be clean. It didn’t matter what we had been doing, we weren’t allowed to go anywhere in dirty shoes…not even scuffed up shoes…for that was a sure sign of “trashiness”. I still find myself now, whenever I meet someone, the first thing I look at is their shoes. I’ve found over the years that this is a pretty good method of sizing people up, although there are some exceptions to this rule.

The farmhouse on the Mallow Farm.

We lived on the farm for several years, and today I consider myself having grown up on a farm even though we moved from it while I was still in elementary school. We moved from the farm because Mom and Dad had bought a house up on the mountain where Dad's family was from. It was originally part of the old Burns property but had been sold off back in the Depression to pay for a store bill. In those days, my Granddaddy didn’t have much but land, so much so that it is told that he sold the back side of the mountain for a horse and buggy, and he sold the land that borders the current Burns property for a bottle of whiskey! I ain’t never for the life of me figured out why he would have sold all the good land on the mountain and the valley below and kept the rockiest part of it. It could be because he couldn’t give away that part of the land, let alone sell it, but at least he kept enough land to give future generations of his family a sense of place and of their heritage. God knows, thats about all we have left! That and a bunch of cousins and relatives who will fight and quarrel over nothing more than a rock, its sad to see that the family has crumbled the way that it has over the past generation or so, it just seems that people don’t want the land but they don’t want anyone else to have it either. I suppose it all happened because Grandmaw and Granddaddy broke the old custom of leaving everything they had to the oldest boy and everyone else just had their lifetime rights to the property, instead of following that custom which had worked for the past 200 or so years, they left their estate to all of their children to be shared equally. The old custom might have been unfair, but the equal sharing way has done nothing but tear the family apart. All I know is that Grandmaw and Granddaddy done what they thought was best.

Remnants of the original Burns homeplace.

So there’s a little dirty family laundry for y’all out there reading this rambling post. Now to continue what I consider the main thread of this story, after we moved up on the mountain, on land that was now ours and ours alone, we found out just how much we missed the farm. While we did still raise hogs and chickens, we didn’t have near the land to grow our garden, raise our stock or just to get out and enjoy. We also didn’t have a big house like we did on the farm and we really had to pare down. We gave truckloads of stuff to my one Aunt who sold a lot of it in a big yard sale. We also gave away stuff to just about anyone who needed something. Probably the two things that most affected me was having to give away a lot of my toys (it took seven pick-up loads to carry all of our toys from the farmhouse, but the new house could only hold around one pick-up load). The other thing was losing our beloved dog, Pete. Pete was a farm dog, and after we moved off of the farm, he pined away for it. One day we noticed Pete was no longer with us, and the next day, the man who owned the farm brought Pete back to us and said that Pete had found his way back to the farm (about 5 miles away). Dad figured it would happen again and told the man if Pete wandered back down to the farm again, to just go ahead and keep him. A few days later, Pete went back to the farm and the man kept him. It was hard letting go of Pete but we knew that is what made Pete happy.

Aside from that, I liked living in our new home, we were located right beside of my Grandmaw Mary, whom I dearly loved, and just under the hill from my Granddaddy’s house. We also didn’t have to walk a half-mile to catch the school bus either. So while I did miss the farm in many ways, I suppose it was for the best. My family had returned home to the mountain that had borne our blood since 1699, and I suspect like the many generations of ancestors who came before, they will remain there for the duration. In the meantime, I am a farmer without a farm but the memories I have continue to sustain me even though in the back of my head I can hear Gerald O’Hara from “Gone With The Wind” repeating “Land, Katie Scarlett, Land. ‘Tis the only thing worth living for, worth fighting for, worth dying for. Land, Katie Scarlett, Land, Why it’s the only thing that matters, it’s the only thing that lasts…”

And to think this all started one early spring day all those years ago with a few old cracked-up pinto beans that weren’t fit to eat.

Remembering

All photos are of the old farmhouse I grew up in.

"This Old House" by Loretta Lynn

Oh, if this old house could talk
What a story it would tell
It would tell about the good times
And the bad times as well
It would tell about the love that lived
And died inside these walls
And the sound of little footsteps
Runnin' up and down the hall.

Oh, if this old house could talk
It would break my heart in two
I couldn't stand to be reminded
Of all the things we used to do
There's no love in this old house no more
So I got it up for sale
Why, if this old house could talk
What a story it could tell.

Oh, if this old house could talk
I know what it would say,
I'm as lonesome as you are
And I feel more empty every day
Well, I even miss the babies
Who built me up to feel this way
Why, if this old house could talk
Lord, I know what it would say.

If this old house could talk
What a story it would tell
We built this home together
And with love we drove each nail
Take me in your arms and hold me
'Cause we've been apart too long
Why if this old house could talk
All it would say is welcome home.

Belvedere

When I was growing up, I was considered by my family to be the pet pig. This was because I was the baby of the bunch, and for 12 years I remained that. During this time, I was doted on and given free reign of the place, and I got by with a lot more than I probably should have.

Me at age 2. Those pants prove I was at the height of fashion.

I’m pretty sure that I was my granddaddy’s favorite grandchild, and I could get anything out of him or do anything and it’d be just fine. He was so proud of me, he’d tell people, “That boy can drive hen shit to gunpowder.” That’s how good I was.

Now this isn’t to say that the other kids, including my brother who is only 18 months older than I am, were slighted in any way, I’m just saying that I got by with more than my fair share because of my pet pig status. I remember one time when we lived on the farm, I got a BB gun for my birthday. I was out playing in the side yard and my brother was in the upstairs window, making faces at me. He apparently thought he would be safe from my vengeance, but I proved him wrong, I shot at him through the window. He dodged to the side, and I waited…he poked his head back in front of the window to see if I was still outside, and when he did, I shot again. Another windowpane bit the dust. This continued until I had shot every window out of that upstairs bedroom. As soon as I’d shot out the last one, Jason hollered out, “Mom…Matthew’s outside shooting out the upstairs windows.” Mom then came outside and investigated the situation and took my BB gun away, and told me I was going to have to pay for those windows, and she was taking by $2 allowance to do so. It wasn’t but maybe a half hour later, and after a talk with my granddad, that I got back my BB gun. He also gave me $2 and told me not to shoot out anymore windows...and not to tell Mom!

Me, my Granddad and my Uncle Tom in 1986. Notice my beaver pose!

I remember how I used to stay overnight with my granddad and we’d go riding around in his huge red International station wagon named “Belvedere”. Belvedere had a front seat, a back seat and an enormous back end that usually was filled with kids and chainsaws. I know those two don’t mix, but I remember always hating to have to find a seat where you wasn’t up against a chainsaw chain.

This is exactly was Belvedere looked like on she was fire engine red! Photo from motormint.com


One time, when I was about 5 years old, just me and my granddad was coming back from the store in Belvedere (by now you’ve probably realized I never missed a trip to the store) and I only knew my numbers up to 100. Belvedere registered up to 120 miles per hour, and I wanted my granddad to sink the needle in the straight stretch going out Germany Valley. However, I didn’t tell my granddad to “Go a hundred and twenty”, instead I said what I knew “Go Twelve-O, granddaddy, go twelve-O”!! Well, Belvedere might have registered 120 mph, but it certainly couldn’t go that fast, looking back I doubt that it could have went 120 mph if it was falling straight down a well. Granddad used to have a saying about how much power Belvedere had, he would say “It couldn’t pull a sick woman off of a shitpot”. I believe that says all you ever need to know about Belvedere!! Let’s suffice it to say that it never did go “Twelve-O”.

Collecting Sand with Pete

When we lived on the farm, my brother Jason and I liked to go on forays to collect "sand". It was, in all actuality, just really fine clay dirt but we called it sand anyway. We gathered it from places in the washed out road where the water would pool up. When the pools dried up, “sand” was left behind. We gathered this sand from all around the farm and put it in our sandbox.

On the farm aggravating Dad...you can tell from our filthy shirts that we had fun that day!

One morning, we got the notion to go collect sand before Mom was out of bed. Mind you, seldom was the time when we beat Mom out of bed but then again we did rise with the chickens. We knew it was against the rules to go outside before anyone was up but we figured if we left a note it would be all right. Well we left our note “We have went to collect sand” stuck right there on the face of the TV, and off we went to collect that sand.

Part of the farm road where we collected "sand".

We were having a good ole time, and we were accompanied by Pete, our loyal protector Border Collie. While we were collecting sand Pete ran growling and barking down into the holler near where we were gathering sand. Pete was down there in the holler, growling, barking and what sounded like fighting, the whole time we were collecting sand. By the time we had collected enough sand to return home, Mom was coming down the road looking for us. Unbeknownst to either of us, the panther had been spotted the previous evening near where we were gathering sand and Mom was concerned. She was going to tell us when we got up that morning to play near the house, but we got up before she did that day.

Since that day, we have always believed and we can’t be convinced otherwise, that Pete was down in the holler and keeping the panther away from us. As usual, he was protecting us. When Pete came home that evening, he was limping and had obviously been in a fight.

A few years later when we moved off the farm, Pete kept walking back down to the farm from up on the mountain until finally Dad just gave him to John Mallow because Pete was a farm dog, and like us, had a hard time adjusting to our new home in Monkeytown.

Ol' Doan

Growing up on the farm had its advantages for a precocious child such as myself, first off, I could practically run wild all over the farm and could do whatever I wanted to do as long as I didn’t hurt myself. One of my favorite pastimes as a child was harassing one of our bulls named “Ol’ Doan”. Ol’ Doan got his name because he was purchased off of Doan Harman down at Onego, WV, but he had been on our farm for several years. Ol’ Doan was a giant of a Hereford bull, he was Red with a white face and I know he weighed at least 2,000 lbs. He was scary to look at with his massive size and the typically gnarled face of a bull. However, Ol' Doan was as gentle as could be, and I used this to my advantage!

A hereford bull, this is exactly what Ol' Doan looked like.

Whenever Ol' Doan was around, I would harass him by throwing rocks at him, and would allow all the cows to get to the water tank except for Ol' Doan. I wouldn’t even let Ol' Doan walk up the road by our house, I made him walk down into the holler and up around the hillside to get to the other side of the farm. I don’t know why I did this, I guess I was a cattle bully, and I guess because I could.

Also, whenever the cows were in heat, Ol' Doan would get into calling out to them like a bull does, “Mooooo,moooo,moo,moo,mo” in a series of quick “moo’s” that were drawn out at the beginning and ended with a growl-like “mmmmm”. Well, I quickly caught on that Ol' Doan didn’t like competition, he dominated our other two bulls on the farm, Blackie and Ernie. They were solid black in color and were much smaller than Ol' Doan, though not as friendly. This isn’t to say Blackie and Ernie were mean though, we wouldn’t allow mean stock to stay on our farm. Anyway, I caught on that if I mocked Ol' Doan when he was calling to the cows, it really ticked him off, he would get really mad, stomp his feet and run up and down the hillsides looking for the other bull who was challenging him. I didn’t think Ol' Doan ever figured out that it was me that was tomenting him, until one day he got me back.

Remnants of the old chickenhouse and the farmhouse.

Ol' Doan must have seen me enter the old chickenhouse, which was across the creek from our house and into a little meadow on the opposite hill. I was probably in the chickenhouse looking for eggs or somehow torturing the chickens, I don’t exactly remember what led me to the chickenhouse that afternoon. Usually I always went over there with someone since there was always someone who’d tag along with you wherever you went on the farm, but that day I went alone. As I recollect, as soon as I went in the chickenhouse, I saw Ol’ Doan running off the hill toward me. I didn’t think anything of it, I just figured I'd have a chance to throw a rock at him or hit him with a stick or something. But this time, Ol’ Doan didn’t appear to be cowardly around me, he poked his head into the chickenhouse door and bellowed at me, I threw a handful of corn at him and he backed out of the chickenhouse, but instead of leaving, he laid down against the door and blocked my exit from the chickenhouse.

A close-up of the old chickenhouse.

I hollered for help but nobody came to check on me, I went out into the chicken coop and hollered over to the house, and still nobody came to see about me. I know I stood there for a half hour, whenever I’d try to get the door open, Ol’ Doan would just look at me and softly moo. After I saw that the big lummox wasn’t going to move, I went back out to the coop and hollered again over the house, and Mom heard me but didn’t know where I was hollering from. Later she said they wondered if I had fallen into a cave or a sinkhole that permeated the property because they could hear me but it was a really faint call for help. Mom got a few others to look for me and they looked over at the chickenhouse and seen Ol’ Doan laying there but didn’t think anything of it. When I saw them look over toward me, I let out the squall of all squalls and jumped up and down and waved my hands, finally they spotted me and the whole lot of them burst out laughing. They had seen that Ol’ Doan had finally paid me back for all the mischief I had inflicted upon him. When they came over to the chickenhouse to rescue me, Ol’ Doan just got up and walked off like he didn’t know what going on, but after that I remember being a little more respectful of Ol’ Doan.

Be it ever so humble!

When Jason started to school we still lived up Johnson Holler at Earls and his Kindergarten year he rode across the mountain to catch the bus in Monkeytown, where it would take him to Circleville School. So Mom and Dad came up with the idea to move closer to the school since I would be starting the next year and so Dad would be closer to work.

Sometime between Jason’s kindergarten year and mine we moved to John Mallows farm in the Harman Hills. I don’t recall anything about the move but I do recall that we had to really clean the house before we could move in. It seems that someone let some sheep into the house and they used it for a barn for some time prior to us moving in. I recall Dad, Granddad, and my uncle using scoop shovels to scrape sheepshit out of the house, while Mom and my Aunts operated a bucket brigade full of water and spic-and-span. I remember that the crap on the floors was at least 8 inches deep, a normal person would have give it up for a lost cause and moved on, but just show a Burns an impossible thing and tell him he can't do it...and see how fast it gets done!!

After a few days of hard work and even more cleaning, we got to move in to a huge old farmhouse situated on 570 or so acres of farmland. I think everyone who stayed at John’s (as we called the place) just loved it. We got to live there rent free as long as Dad helped out with some farmwork, a non-issue really since Dad was always out doing something on the farm anyway. There was only one major drawback to John’s…it was ¾ of a mile off of a backroad. In the wintertime, you had to walk in and out. It was a real ordeal to get us kids to walk out to catch the bus in the dead of winter. Dad went to work at the same time so he would walk with us, and sit in the car with us until the bus came.

The old farmhouse has seen better days, this is a current photo of the old place.

I remember one Christmas we all decided to go have Christmas at Dad’s older sister Barb’s house in Virginia. It was blue-assed cold when we walked out to the car carrying presents. On the way the wind whipped some of them out of our hands and blowed them into a nearby holler. Later the next summer Jason and I were still finding some of our Christmas presents in that holler. Most of the time we would spend Christmas in Monkeytown at the homeplace up on the hill where my Granddad lived.

Seasons came and went while we grew up on the farm, looking back we only lived there but a couple of years, but it seems much longer to me now, we loved living on the farm. We had a huge garden on the farm, of course we needed a big garden to grow enough food for all the kids mom and dad were raising. I remember helping in the garden, I’m sure I was more in the way than anything but helping nonetheless.

While working in the garden, mom would inevitably find a toad or at least she’d pretend to find a toad and chase us kids with it. We’d all run and hide wherever we could find a place to hide and get away from her. You'd have thought it was man eating toad the way we carried on about it. I remember a bunch of us locked ourselves in the attic one time to get away from her. There was a big ball-hornets nest up there and hornets were flying all around our heads, but it was still a much-preferred location over the garden with mom and her toad. I’m sure she thought it was big fun but even to this day I am scared to death of frogs and toads.

Below is a photo of the farmhouse today, complete with the ball hornets nest!

Stay tuned for more of the continued exploits of Matthew growing up.