Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada
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.