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| That's me stepping in cow shit |
I think our Chicago winter has let go of its grip. Spring has been quite the tease with eighty degrees one day and freezing the next just to remind us of what winter can do. I'm pretty sure we can now breathe a sigh of relief for the next three months. Summer is here, finally! Who doesn't love summer. The three months that we can look down our nose at Florida.
The fine weather yesterday got me to thinking about summers when I was a kid. So many great times. Like the year we went to a farm in Indiana. It was owned by an old buddy of my dad. His name was Bucky. Apparently Dad and Bucky were good friends in the army during WWII, so one summer we got to visit Bucky's farm. It was very rustic. I was probably five years old, and I hated it. They did have electricity on the farm, but no plumbing to speak of. This son of suburban Chicago had never seen an outhouse before. My god, we had to poop outdoors in a little shed? Yes, I had to plop my tiny ass on a board with a hole in it and when I was done it didn't even flush. The crap just lay there about four feet below, smelling and drawing flies. Okay, so I learned something that summer about how farmers pooped. I also learned something about cute baby cows. I learned that they lived in the barn and pooped where they lived. To my horror, I found that when you tried to pet one, they will step on your foot. That hurt a lot, but I probably got my revenge later that day when we had hamburgers for dinner. Like I said, the farm was rustic, no plumbing. After playing in the barnyard and probably smelling like cow shit, Mom figured that I needed a bath. Down in the basement of the farm house, was a hand pump. I was told to undress and step into a galvanized metal tub full of water, exactly like the one the cows drank out of. The water was tepid at best and to rinse, water was poured over me from a bucket.
There was one thing about that farm visit that I did enjoy. One day my dad and Bucky had to go into town. They stopped off at a gas station and went inside to do some adult stuff. Probably just to bullshit and have a smoke with friends. Anyway, out behind the gas station were a bunch of old rusty cars rotting in among the trees. I was in heaven. I got to crawl around inside the old hulks and pretend that I was driving. It was great fun. In fact that may be how I got my penchant for owning old cars. Playing in the rust, grease and dirt was so much fun. Fun until we got back to the farm and Mom made me take another bath in that damn cow, drinking tub.
Great story, Alan! We would visit my father's siblings on their farms in southern Indiana when my brother and sister and I were somewhere between five and twelve. My Aunt Hazel would "harvest" a chicken to fry for lunch. There was an out house, and a tub in the back room for the weekly bath. I learned to gather eggs from the chicken coop--chores, you know. That was at one farm; our other hosts were not as rustic, but their country homes were more interesting than the in-town house where I lived at the time....
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