Story originally printed in the Westby Times or online at www.westbytimes.com
Published - Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Across the Fence: Is It Summer Vacation Yet?
Summer begins slowly in Wisconsin. The subtle changes go almost unnoticed at first, as the sun arcs higher in the sky each day. Sunshine and longer days bring changes to the countryside as buds turn to flowers and the land turns green once more. New life, which began in the early spring, now begins to mature. This weekend, a drive through the Kickapoo Valley Reserve in Vernon County, Wisconsin, was a wonderland of shades of green, bathed in the afternoon sunshine.
Usually, green rows of corn are visible by now as they break through the brown earth of the cornfields. This year due to the wet spring, it was hard to get in the fields and some have yet to be planted as I write this. Alfalfa is starting to grow in the hay fields and Dandelions and Yellow Rockets are blooming in all their yellow glory. It's a season of change as we head from spring into summer.
"Summertime and the livin' is easy." Those words from an old song certainly don't apply to life on the farm. There's always work to do.
When I was in school, we could hardly wait for summer vacation to start each year, but when it finally arrived there was little time to play. As farm kids we worked every day.
One of the big jobs of spring was helping clean the chicken house and pig house of a winter's accumulation of manure, and haul out the big manure pile that had been dumped behind the barn during the winter months. We worked with Dad as we dug it out of the houses and pitched it into the manure spreader. When the spreader was full, Dad would take the load out and spread it on the tobacco and cornfields.
I kept asking if I could drive the tractor and spread the manure, but when I was younger, Dad didn't trust me to do it alone. Finally, he relented, and let me take a load to the field. While I was unloading the manure, the spreader plugged up. I hadn't slowed down fast enough when the beaters became clogged and the chain on the spreader busted. Uff da, I knew I was in trouble.
It was a long walk back to the barn to tell Dad. The one time he had trusted me to take a load of manure to the field by myself and I had screwed it up. He was not happy! There were many loads to haul and this brought a halt to everything. While Dad went to town to buy a new part for the chain, I had to unclog the beaters at the rear of the spreader. It was both humiliating and hard work as I struggled to pull the manure that had wound tight around the beaters and caused the chain to break. When I could no longer pull it free with the pitchfork, I got on my hands and knees in the spreader and pulled at it by hand. I was glad nobody, especially any girls, were around to see me.
Now I watch the "honey wagons" spreading liquid manure on the fields. I wonder if they ever plug up?
The transition from spring to summer was more than just hauling manure and providing the "sweet smell of spring" for anyone who drove by. Spring also reminds me of our one-room country school. When Corrine Fredrickson was our teacher, during my sixth through eighth grades, she let us have classes at Birch Hill on a beautiful spring day before summer vacation began. That was a wooded, rocky area about a half-mile from Smith School. I can now see Birch Hill when I look out our south-facing windows.
School held in a clearing in the woods is something I wish everyone could experience. Maybe you were one of those lucky people too. We sat on the grass or on rock ledges as Miss Fredrickson conducted classes, just as she did every day, within the confining walls of our school building. But, there was something special about sitting outside under a canopy of trees, with the wind whistling through the leaves, and birds singing all around us. We even spotted a fox one year. When we weren't having class we explored the woods and rock ledges and played hide and seek. We went off by ourselves or with a friend and sat under a tree in the solitude of the surroundings and quietly read a book or studied together. Miss Fredrickson made school and learning fun and it showed when so many of her students excelled in high school.
As much as we enjoyed school and being with our friends, I think everyone was ready and looking forward to summer vacation, even if it meant working almost every day. Besides the normal farm chores and helping with the milking, morning and night, seven days a week, there were tobacco beds to water each day, then tobacco planting, replanting tobacco when it rained, hoeing the weeds out of the tobacco, cultivating corn and tobacco, cutting hay, raking hay, baling hay, hauling hay, and helping Ma plant and weed the large garden… and that was just June! It's no wonder we were usually glad when school started again in the fall.
Looking back, summer vacation wasn't really a vacation, it was more of a vocation when you lived on a farm.
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