One of the writers on Twitter sent put a request for folks to also exchange Facebook info and I did. This morning, she posted about hay in their barn and that did bring up the memory of the hayloft in my paternal grandparents’ barn. I have previously posted about my sympathy for the economic plight of family farms balanced by my recognition of why corporate farming is what actually feeds the country. Anyway, in spending part of each summer at the farm in Arkansas, there were certain givens. One was playing in the hayloft. This was of course before we realized how allergic my brother was to such things. Gathering the eggs from the chickens was a fun chore. Unless you have done this, you probably don’t know that when pigs are crowded into the trough feeding, you can stand behind them and pull (gently) the curl out of their tails and watch them curl back up. Sitting on the fence watching Papaw herd the cows back from the pasture in late afternoon was a daily treat, too. Arkansas, by the way, is hot and muggy in the summer and we would definitely nee to wash our sweaty faces more than once a day. Three hefty meals a day was in order, but snacks were mostly taking a ripe tomato from the box Mamaw kept by the back door. There is something special about eating a garden fresh tomato in the same way as you do an apple.

The annual killing of chickens to put up in the freezer was a pretty messy affair and I’m not sure we thought that was fun. There was also a lot of canning that went on and we didn’t help with that so much as we stayed out of the way. In truth, I suppose I did occasionally wonder why it was referred to as “canning” when what you actually use are mason jars.  I imagine there were times we claimed to bored although there generally was plenty going on to keep our attention.