And miles to go before I sleep.......

Good Evening to everyone. I am, once again, happy to have you reading this next post in my blog. Putting the posts in this blog has been thus far an interesting thing. Sometime fun and sometime not so fun. Sometime it's brought a smile to my face and sometime a grimace of pain long forgotten and suddenly remembered. The post for today is in two parts. First I'd like to recall my Dad. He succumbed to cancer after a stalwart battle for three years. After two surgeries, three courses of Chemo and altogether about eighteen to twenty four months of radiation He finally found relief from the pain that had been his constant companion for so long. As much as I wanted to keep him I found myself feeling a bit guilty for being glad he'd passed away. I was just so very tired of seeing him suffer so terribly and for so long. He was in life a role model for so many people, including myself. He had by my sixteenth birthday taught me much about building. I never do anything to this day that doesn't make me remember something he taught me. He was a big man, standing six feet and four inches tall and weighing between two hundred seventy five and three hundred pounds. Not until his later years did he begin to pick up weight that wasn't muscle. He was indeed a gentle giant, having a soft heart that led him to, behind the scenes, helping probably hundreds of people. Most people never knew this of him because he didn't want it openly known. He just wanted to help and gained his reward from the act of giving. He was, I suppose, one of the most unforgettable people in the life of this writer. He may be also where I gained my stunning good looks. ( :-D ) (Please allow me this small bit of humor) The second part of this post is about learning work on a farm. At the age of about ten years old I started helping with the work on our family farm. We generally had about 40 acres of cotton and 30 acres of corn. After the death of Dennis and Jerry getting his greetings (draft notice) from Uncle Sam I was suddenly at the age of fourteen the main farm worker. All of this with a red and a brown mule. (with which you're already well acquainted) On top of that I had on average twelve thousand chickens, forty head of cattle, several hogs and usually some horses. My Dad held a construction job but helped all he could, which was anytime he was not working away from home. I don't remember what we did in our spare time ( :-D ) By the age of fourteen I was carrying two fifty pounds sacks of fertilizer, one on each shoulder through a freshly plowed field. Not an easy feat for any age. By fifteen years of age I was tossing fifty to seventy five pound bales of hay onto a stack fifteen feet high. Yes, we worked long and hard, but we also took some time to play and we played as hard as we worked. In the winter there wasn't so much to do so we used our time in other ways. Sometimes we used the winter time to clear ground for planting, and sometime we hunted and supplimented our diet with wild game.
I suppose some of you have heard the 'old saying' "making hay while the sun shines". We lived that many times. When a neighbor would have freshly mowed hay in the field and we saw it was going to rain neighbors from miles around would show up and we'd work into the night getting his hay into his barn. If it got wet it was ruined and that neighbor had no hay for his livestock that winter. So, when we saw a friend/neighbor in need we'd all do whatever it took to pitch in and help. We did work hard but I remember it as a really good time. A time when neighbors knew each other for miles around and looked out for each other. A time, it seems, long, long vanished...... ..............and so it went.......