Summer in Sudan part 2 - On the Farm

While we had fun in town, the real fun was going out to Uncle Blackie and Aunt Elsie's farm with my cousins Van and Patsy.

Their farm was several miles outside of town. After traveling several miles of "paved" roads the last turn was onto a sandy dirt road that was a real mess when it rained. The paved roads were of a tar and gravel composition and weren't really that good. When Pleaston View Drive in Arlington got paved it was the same tar and gravel composition. They owned 640 acres and there were several more sections, a section is a 640 acre plot, that belonged to the Seymour family that they sometimes farmed or that we could go hunting on.

Before they built a new house on the paved road when we were much older, they had a small house surrounded by a few trees. As you know, there aren't too many trees in West Texas and when you find two or three together you usually find a house. So their house was very typical. We always went into the door on the backside of the house away from the road. I don't know if there was even a door on the road side. When you came to their house you pulled off the road and into the chicken yard between the house and the barns and other out buildings. When you went in the door you were in the litchen. There was a bedroom to the left of the kitchen and a large living room when you went straight on through the kitchen. Off the living room was one or two other bedrooms, or maybe it was just another bedroom and the bathroom. Anyway, it was a small house.

The water came from a well and a windmill kept water pumped into a holding tank from which the livestock was watered. The well house was a thick walled stucco building and inside was a that was kept very cool by the stucco walls where they kept a lot of canned goods. I always thought that it was really neat how cool it was in that room even when it was 100 degrees or so outside.

To the west of the house about 100 feet was the main barn. It was larger than the house and held the sheltered portion of the hog pen, the cattle stalls, and the hay loft above the stalls. South of the house was the hen house and between the barn and the hen house was the well house. The area by the barn was fenced with a combination of wood planks running horizontally and hog wire. Where that fence stopped a single strand of electric wire fence ran around the well house and hen house and on around to the road. There was a wire fence that ran all along the road except where the house and driveway around the house were. The land to the west of the barn was an area for the cattle to graze. South and east of the house were the garden and usually a field planted in maize. I suppose they could have had cotton in there sometimes, but I remember maize. On the rest of the 640 acres there were large cotton fields and maize fields. Sporadically, there were grazing areas that were not tilled.

That's the physical layout of the farm and the site for our adventures.

The chickens ran all over the area between the house and the hen house. They had lots of chickens. We'd gather fresh eggs from the hen house every morning and every evening. At lunch, if we were going to have gried chicken, we got to go out and pick our chicken. We select one and go catch it. Sometimes we had to select another one more easily caught. After we caught it we had to kill it and clean it. I don't rember a whole lot about that process but we were shown how to do it and did it. Aunt Elsie always said I was really good at snapping the chicken's neck and killing it. Gary was always too squimish and couldn't get a good, quick break. I remember Van catching one and chopping its head off with a hatchet. You've heard the expression "running around like a chicken with its head cut off"? Well, I've seen it! That chicken ran around in circles all the time spurting blood. Finally, it quit and died. I guess Aunt Elsie always gutted it and plucked the feathers. I don't really remember doing that. Anyway, Elsie's chicken was always great, and, for Gary, we always had mashed potatoes. He loved Aunt Elsie's mashed potatoes.

Any leftovers that weren't fit to save were thron to the hogs. They really like the leftovers and would really go at it eating them. I didn't liek the hogs much. They stunk, they were big, and I was warned they could hurt you. When they ran out of bacon or ham they'd load a hog into the pickup truck, tie it in securely, and take it to the butcher shop in town. A few days later there was fresh bacon, pork chops, pork loin, ham, and sausage.

We helped feed and milk the cows, too. Milking a cow isn't as easy as it might appear. You had to tie their head up so they wouldn't reach around and bite you and you had to be careful they didn't kick you with their hind leg. If you knew what you were doing the cows didn't give you much trouble. Obviously, I didn't or at least didn't do it well. The normal way to make a fist is bring all your fingers together at the same time or may even bring your little finger, then ring finger, and on up first. You don't get any milk that way. You have squeeze the teat with your index finger first and then then middle finger and on down to squeeze the milk out while kind of puuling down on the whole teat. When you have both hands going right you can get alternating steady streams going and get the cow milked in good time. Perhaps the cows didn't like us because we were also known to direct the stream at someone standing nearby and have milk fights that way.

They also had ducks that swam in the stock tank and nested in the barn. They didn't eat the duck eggs. They let them accumulate until a duck sat on them for the 28 days or so required and hatched them. One day when Buddy and Travis were there with us we had a brilliant idea. We gathered up a bunch of the duck eggs and went up into the hay loft. There, we moved some of the remaining hay bales around and made a couple of forts, divided up teams, and had an egg fight! Since a lot of these eggs were ones that a duck had been sitting on for days and maybe weeks, these were rotten eggs and boy did they stink! I think we quit when Patsy got hit a by a couple of rotten eggs and went to the house to clean up. When Aunt Elsie found out what we were doing she was livid. She wanted the new ducklings and she didn't want a stinking barn. She yelled at us but we didn't get a spanking or any other punishment that I recall.

Picking cotton is tough. While they had a tractor that had an automatic picker on it, they also hired migrant workers who were paid by the sack for what they hand picked. I tried it for about 30 minutes one day. It was hot. It was hard to get the bole to lets loss of the plant. And, you just didn't get much cotton in the bag for all that work. Van and I fixed that. We crawled up into the trailer that the cotton picker attachment was dumping its cotton into and filled up our bags from that spout! That was much easier picking!

The best tortillas I ever had was from one of those migrant worker kitchens. One evening Van and I were walking back from one of the fields a long way from the house. The workers had already quit for the day and they were staying in one of the old one room houses on one of the adjacent properties. They gotto stay rent free in one of those shacks as part of their pay. As we were walking by we saw that they were cooking dinner. Vam asked them if they had anything we could eat. Thye brought us each a fresh flour tortilla. Up until that time I had never had a flour tortilla. I had only had thin corn tortillas. This flour tortilla was was as big as a pancake, hot out of the skillet. We put a little butter on it and ate it. Boy was it good! Maybe it was just because I was so hungry. Maybe it was because it was the first time I'd ever had a flour tortilla. I don't know. I only know it was good and I remember it to this day.

Well, this has been long enough; but, quickly let me tell one more story. One reason I gave you the layout of the farm was for this story. we were playing baseball over in the maize field. There was enough room between the field and the electric fence by the hen house. The ball was hit and I went back to catch it. Did you know how hard it is to catch a fly ball when you're getting zapped by an electric fence! It was quite a surprise and I dropped the ball. I don't like electric fences. They won't hurt you but they sure scare the beejeezus out of you.

I loved summers in Sudan.