My Life in a Book

My memories of Mom start at an early age. I'm guessing about three or four years old. I can remember her planting and caring for a garden up by the barn on the first farm that Mom and Dad owned. As I look back on Mom's influence in my life, I come to understand that she was very supportive in what I wanted to do. She knew I had a strong draw to live on the farm so, she and Dad let me live with my Uncle Donnie for three months during school summer vacation for several years until we moved back to the farm from the city. During my Highschool years she attended every football game and every track meet that was in the city. She would make a steak dinner before every football game for me to eat. Turns out that's really not the thing to eat before strenuous activities. Carbohydrates are what's needed not protein. It didn't seem to slow me down much. I remember she got teased a lot about her cooking but I loved her apple pies and have not found any that quite compares with

At the early age of three I was already mastering my driving skills under the teaching of my Dad. This is the same tractor that Dad used to pull porch to it's new position on the house. The tractor didn't have an electric starter on it so a crank had to be used to start the beast. To eliminate the cranking, Dad parked it on a hill to coast start it. Thinking that I was ready for a solo run, I decided to play on the tractor and somehow released the brakes and coasted this relic right down into a tree. Fortunately I didn't try to to bale out but rode it like I knew what to do. It's a good thing the hill wasn't steep or too long. It didn't damage the tractor but my mother's emotions were another thing. antics 

This is the house that I first remember. It had four rooms on the first floor and two rooms upstairs. This picture was after the porch was moved from the right side of the house to this front side of the house. I'm not sure when that happened but I can remember Dad doing it. I have fond memories of Playing in this front yard.  I didn't actually see Dad doing it but heard stories about how he pulled it around the house with the farmall tractor that I farmed with many years later. He was concentrating on the moving of the porch and dropped the front wheels into the cellar by the house. I'm not sure how it got the front wheels out of the cellar but Dad was very creative on how to get things done. There was a big tree in the front yard just to the right of this picture that had big bulges on the trunk of the tree. It was a great tree to climb with foot holds on the bumps. I had many wonderful play times in this yard. Just down the hill to the right of this picture was a creek t