A Child's Farm

I wonder why it is that so many little boys want to be farmers. I was no different and I was a farmer at a very early age. No, it wasn’t your typical farm. Mine was inside the house and was often spread out on the floor of the back porch in our home. I guess that statement needs a little explaining.

I was always in love with animals at an early age and it is something that has got stronger as time has gone on. There was a time that I considered farming however when I got out of high school my father worked at a local factory and I got a job there. Except for my four years in the U.S. Air Force, I ended up working nearly thirty years in manufacturing.

As I get back to explaining the farm, the family knew how much I liked those things. One year as a present I got a farm set and I’m pretty sure it was ordered from the Sears Roebuck & Co. catalog. It was one of the presents that I had the most fun with in my childhood.

I would lay out the hundreds of pieces on the floor of the porch and do my farming for the day. I would have the farmhouse sitting in a nice grassy area and a little distance away I would place the barn with a fence around a big part of it. Inside the fence would be the horses and the cows.

How many times I moved them around, I have no idea. It has to be in the high hundreds or maybe a thousand times. Outside the fence, I had many chickens and they also got moved many times. I had to move them, animals and birds made out of metal and plastic couldn’t move without help. However, to this little boy, they were so real.

The farm set had a little tractor and I hooked up the trailer to the back and hauled around a lot of bales of hay in the years I was a boy farmer. I would open the gate to the fence and store the hay in the barn. How it seemed so real when I was putting that hay away. A little boy’s imagination can go wild.

Many times I would pick up the chickens and grab an imaginary egg. I must have collected hundreds and gave them to mom to serve for breakfast. Those eggs sure tasted good, some of the best I had ever eaten. I didn’t know it at the time but years later when I had KP in the Air Force, me and another guy would crack 3,000 eggs one morning. Maybe that little farm prepared me for the real thing.

I played with that little make-believe farm for a few years before I went on to other things. The times I moved around the tractor with the hay, fed the horses, cows, and chickens have stuck in my memory for nearly sixty years. The memory of moving that fence around so many times, opening and closing the doors to the barn, are so clear like it just happened yesterday.

I didn’t have a huge farm that was hundreds of acres. Mine was only about a five-foot by five-foot square but it was mine and I did everything in that little square that I thought a real farmer would do.

Copyright Larry W. Fish 2017