THE WORLD WE HAD TO PLAY IN

Hello, Neighbor

My last blog "Not dirt poor, just hard up" I ended with the world that my sister and I had to play in. So I thought today I would expand on this world of ours that we were so lucky to have. The first part of our world consisted of the 140 acres that was our farm. This provided us with many,many places to investigate and to explore. We could enter this world of wonder from the back door of our grandparents old farm house.  Just a few yards from the door we would go through an opening in a big rock wall.  Here was a field of  trees, bushes, etc. We would continue going straight across and go through another opening in another rock wall. If we made a left, we could go down the hill and into some woods.  There was this wonderful spring that had been rocked in and was about 6 to 8 feet long. It was always full of cool clear spring water.  I don't think it ever went dry.  There was a small pump that would pump the water all the way across a large field, up a sort of hill and across the road and continue up into the main floor of the barn to provide water for the cattle.  This amazing little pump would start by just holding your thumb on a little thing and that would start the pump.  Thn when the barrel in the barn was full you would just stop the pump by pushing the little thing. I'm not very well informed on this little pump that must have been a hundred years old or more. Can you imagine digging a small ditch all that distance to get water into the barn?  It sure beat carrying it all the way by a pail,that's for sure.

Anyway, going back to where we left off,  we would continue straight until we hit the cow path and followed that through the woods.  Soon we would come to an old, old apple orchard. It, too, must have been a hundred years old.  There were about a half dozen apple trees and thy still produced apples!!! And we did not have to  spray or anything to deal with  all the bugs that attacks our orchards today. Well just beyond the orchard, on the right there could be seen what appeared to be an old, old cellar where you could see that an old house must have been there once upon a time.  I expect that that was the original farm house.  Well to keep going we would have to cross a fence and enter a field of grass.  There was an old house there, too. What was left of it. The walls were all gone, but there was a set of stairs still left to the upper floor. We would go up there, but it probably was not the best of ideas.  I think now that house, or what was left of it, has been now demolished because of safety concerns.

Keeping on we would cross another fence and come to someones driveway. We'd walk down the driveway and there was our destination. Some friends to play with. The main road into the town of Wayne went by there and other friends live a few house down. It was probably a good mile to walk all that distance.

Going back to the our farm house, and going through the open in the rock wall again, this time turning right. We would really get into the real woods part of the f arm. My dad cut a lot of trees there and sold them to pulp mills.  But we would just keep  walking in one direction and we would soon come out onto a paved road.  There was a house there that we would visit once in a while. the lady that lived there was a teacher at the high school that my kids went to when I grew up and had a family.  Just by her house there was a road that had been discontinued for years. But it was passable for walking. This road went down the other side of our farm. So often we would make that round trip and be back at the house.

Down behind the barn and our own house there was a fence. That was the end of our property. But we would climb through that fence and down in the woods there was this neat little brook. We would play along it and walk up the brook to the bridge and take the dirt road back to our house.

In the winter time we would go up into the area where Dad would cut wood because there was a small frog pond. It would freeze over and my sister and I would get out our skates and skate around the little pond.  One Thanksgiving Day we had  gone out there after dinner to skate.  We were enjoying ourselves when we heard this great big "growl".  Now we knew that there was nothing in those woods that would hurt us.  So I figured out that it must have been our Dad who snuck up to try to scare us. Sure enough, he came out from behind a tree.

We sure had a lot of adventures on our 140 acres.  But that was just a small part of our world.  I will have to share the other part at another time.

Stop by again sometime and we'll have another chat.