Making Hay

I spent this past Easter with Aunt Jenny, Jerry and his family. While there, we got to discussing old family stories.

Jerry is Aunt Katie's second oldest step child, yet still part of the family. Terry, Jerry's son, was telling me about his memory of the house.

Terry has the memory of helping with baling hay during the summer. When i told him that we were trying to help Aunt Jenny with the cleaning of the farmhouse, he mentioned that he had never been past the kitchen in the house. He said that Buscha (Polish for Grandmother) would feed them lunch, then shoo them out of the house. And in his 50 years, he had never been upstairs.

Apparently, every summer, as many family members came up to help with hay and general farm work. My Uncle Philip (Sophia's eldest son) told my mom a story about him getting a tractor stuck while going from one side of the property to the other.

The farm had an artisan well they used as a milk house. It was directly behind the house and was tiled in and drained east of the house and into the creek. There was a tile drainage pipeline that went from the end of the milk house under the driveway, along the north side of the tractor shed, and through the pasture until it reached the creek. Over time, that tile pipeline has broken and many sink-hole-like holes have formed. The loamy soil type of Central Ohio when mixed with water becomes very slick and sticky.

One summer, Uncle Philip was running a tractor in the north field above the barn. Before he started, either Uncle Frank, or Uncle John, told him to not cross over the stream from the spring to get to the south side of the farm or else he would get stuck. Well, Uncle Philip thought he would give it a try because otherwise, he would have to go back out the gate, around the barn, past the tractor shed, and back through another gate. As could be imagined, he got stuck. He had to walk back up to the house, tell the uncles that he had got the tractor stuck, and they told him he had to figure out a way to get it unstuck. He did get it out of the mud, but it was a lesson learned.