Up Before Five – the Family Farm

UP BEFORE FIVE - THE FAMILY FARM  

December 2011/January, 2012 issue 
My  wife has often accused me of taking an interminable length of time to   complete projects. Such was the case with a book I just had published  two months  ago. 
  
 My  mother and father passed away in 2001 and 2004, respectively. Almost a   decade earlier they had urged me to write a book, relating our farming   experiences when we enjoyed so many pleasant memories of toiling in the  fields  together, going on picnics, and actually sitting down to a  meal, together, as a  family. In their retirement, they noted that the  days of families and neighbours  working together in the fields was a  rapidly disappearing feature of our  society. Small farms, like we owned  on the south shore of the Bay of Quinte, in  Prince Edward County, were  disappearing. So, were the small fields and small  machinery. The  writing was on the wall. It was rapidly becoming less about small   fields and mom and pop endeavours, and more about gigantic tractors and  wildlife  rich fencerows being unceremoniously bulldozed to transform  small farms into one  huge field. The farming scene changing. It was now  big business. It was time to  close the stable door for good and hang  up our pitch fork. So, when more money  than we had ever seen at one  time in our lives was dangled in front of us, we  snatched it with no  apology.  
  
 I  spent most of last winter in my home office, immersing myself into the   memories of that wonderful era of neighbour helping neighbour, family  picnics,  threshing bees and filling silo. It wasn’t hard to do.  Although my parents  retired and moved into Picton, my wife and I  retained an acre off the one corner  of the farm. I could still walk the  fields, albeit overgrown with red cedars and  ash trees, and recall the  days of spreading manure, baling hay, combining grain  and picking  tomatoes. A kilometre walk down the road brought me to the homestead   where I could stare at the dairy barn and remember our entire family  helping to  deliver a calf in the middle of the night, or working in the  hay mow next to a  hot metal roof on an unforgiving July day, as bale  after bale of hay worked its  way up the elevator from the wagon below. I  remember a school chum recognizing  my father in the mow, but asking  who that “other man” was on the wagon. It was  my mother, dressed in a  plaid shirt, blue jeans and a baseball cap.
  
 The  200-page book, generously sprinkled with over 60 photos from the 1950s   and 1960s tells the story of how small farms were the social fabric of  the  community. Mostly, the book is about our farm and is filled with  humorous day to  day misadventures. There is sorrow too, like the time  we watched one of our best  cows bleed to death from a lung hemorrhage,  or trying to come to grips with the  death of two young pilots of a T-33  jet trainer that exploded when it crashed in  a field just west of our  house. 
  
 However,  the book is mostly about the good times, of a dog that smoked a  pipe,  and the time  my parents were mortified after I presented a gift of a   blue, plastic pottie at the neighbours’ baby shower and announced that  it had  once been mine, but I hadn’t used it much.  I remember my father  sitting on an  overturned tomato crate under the Manitoba maple, hand  sharpening hay mower  knives. My mother asking a puzzled city boy who  spent a few nights with us one  January, if he wanted to take a stone to  bed with him. Heating a large rock in  the oven of the cookstove,  wrapping it in a cloth and placing it under the  covers at the foot of  the bed was how we kept warm at night. 
  
 The  book is a collection of stories about spring tillage, harvesting hay   and my nephew’s tragic mistake at the age of 13 of claiming he could  lift a bale  of hay. He was subsequently hired for six years to help in  the harvest of the  hay. He now owns a Home Hardware store in Morrisburg  and still remembers those  days. 
  
 As  farmers, we were animal lovers, and that extended beyond the Holsteins   and Herefords to a plethora of farm pets including skunks, raccoons,  robins and  sparrow hawks, goats, squirrels, even a pet pig who was  trained to papers. It’s  about Christmas and how Chico, a fox terrier,  would check on a rawhide beef chew  under the Christmas tree and not  touch it until Christmas morning. And a black  lab who was so terrified  of water that, when tossed off the dock in an effort to  bathe her, she  swam out to sea and we had to bring her back with the boat.
  
 A  few excerpts from the book:  “Dad was seldom heard to swear. But he did   often come up with some colourful and unusual expletives whenever a  cow failed  to cooperate. A cow was sometimes referred to as reprobate  or, his personal  favourite, a trollop.” 
  
 “…….On  another rainy night, I awoke to the sound of my father’s name being   slurred out seductively, followed by several long blasts of a car horn  and a  couple intoxicated verses of ‘Farmer in the Dell’. Cautiously, I  peeked out my  upstairs bedroom window and recognized the truck as  belonging to a neighbour  from the west end of Big Island. There had  been a drinking party somewhere, and  on this night, Dad was the  questionable target. However, Dad attributed the  sound of the horn to a  boat entering the harbour at Baycrest Marina, and failed  to respond to  the outstanding performance being delivered in his honour.”
  
 On  drawing in hay: “Generally, the loads arrived to the barn without   incident. Once, after piling the load rather high to eliminate a return  trip to  the field for the remaining dozen bales or so, cautiously, I  pulled the  overloaded wagon out of the field and onto the laneway. As  the wagon lowered  itself into a dip in the laneway, I looked back in  time to see Dwayne who had  been perched on the uppermost bale slowly  start to disappear, spiralling slowly  around as though he were in a  huge drain of some sort, and the entire one side  of the load begin to  slide to the ground. I found Dwayne still perched atop the  bales, but  now at ground level, unaffected by the unexpected descent, and still   chewing on a stalk of timothy.”
  
 On  naming cows: “Old Shaky was a walking miracle. She was a bundle of   nerves and for this reason was placed at the far end of the stable away  from the  constant noise and traffic associated with milking. Startle  this cow, which  sometimes involved little more than speaking, and her  joints and bones would  rattle like a human skeleton hanging in a  hospital lab. There was little fear  when milking this cow as she was  quite incapable of administering a kick. If her  leg did lift into  position, the joints would lock, leaving the poised leg  dangling like a  useless two by four. Within a few seconds, a joint somewhere  would  crack and her leg would return to the floor. Many of my friends who  would  not otherwise enter a barn, did so just to witness this cow's  peculiar  attribute.” 
  
 I  Remember: Sitting next to the cookstove in winter. We would drop the  oven  door to a horizontal position and sit facing the stove with our  feet on the open  oven door; the smell of a freshly manured field on a  misty morning; my winter  alarm clock - it was my mother shaking the  grates on the woodstove to drop the  ashes into the ash pan below; the  smell of new mown hay; cleaning out our septic  tank, burying my clothes  , then realizing we had to have a whole new system  after all;  listening to  Gordon Sinclair and the news on CFRB-Toronto; seldom   getting a cold. Anything worse than a cold was merely a bad cold. Only  city  people got the flu - farmers got the grippe; walking back our lane  after milking  and listening to the vesper sparrows sing; cow salt -   breaking off chunks where  the cows had licked it into arched hooks, and  sucking on it while I worked;  Coco-cola in glass bottles for 10 cents  at Kenny Carter’s General Store in  Demorestville, 7 cents if you  returned the bottle; the intercom from the barn to  the house. Mother  always had to remind us that egg customers often dropped in,  and that  the colourful language, belching , and other disgusting noises had to   stop
  
 “Up  Before Five – the Family Farm” is available at $20.00 from the Tamworth   Bookstore, and at the Napanee Beaver. The book can also be ordered by  mail  ($25.00) from the author (23 Sprague Rd., R.R. # 1, Demorestville,  Ontario K0K  1W0). Phone 613-476-5072 or e-mail  tsprague@kos.net     
  
 For more information on birding and nature and guided hikes, check out the  NatureStuff website at www.naturestuff.net 
  
 Terry Sprague lives in Prince Edward County and is self-employed as a  professional interpretive naturalist.