Hello Friends and Neighbors...
Today's musings are more memories than anything else. I'm not sure there will be a moral to the story... Just fond memories of growing up on a farm in Central Maine in the 1950s.
A question was recently posed on facebook about folks remembering the milkman delivering milk to their homes in glass bottles. Well, my take on it was that I went WITH the "milkman" to the BARN to get milk!! And sometimes I took my cup to the barn and got my own milk straight from the cow!! Yes, my dad was a dairy farmer back in the day when the milk company came to farms to pick up the milk in large milk cans. The milk room contained a large (well, large in my mind) cooler filled with very cold water and the cans were stored in that cooler until the milk truck came to get them.
Ours was a very small dairy farm. Dad had about seven or eight cows, whose milk production back in the 1950s brought in enough income, combined with other things, to take care of his family which consisted of my mom and me! We always had a fairly large vegetable garden and my mom canned quarts and quarts of vegetables every year.
My dad didn't own a tractor. He had a team of horses, Sandy and Colonel, who were his "right-hand-men" on the farm. Some of their jobs were to pull the plough for the garden spot and to pull the mowing machine to cut the hay. The hay had to dry in the field and then was raked into rows with a horse-drawn hay rake. When the hay was totally dry, the horses were hitched to the haywagon for the loose hay to be piled high, rounded way above the sides of the wagon and hauled to the barn where it was stored overhead in the hayloft.
There was a huge iron fork which worked on a pulley system. The fork dropped down into the wagon, clamped onto a forkful of hay, which then lifted it up to the hayloft to be released and stored for winter feeding.
I remember my mom leading one of the horses back and forth in the driveway to work the pulley. Those horses were such gentle giants. (And I can almost remember being allowed to take hold of the horse's bridle and lead the horse myself once in a while, alongside my mom, of course! Now this leading him myself might be a "memory-movie" in my mind... a movie which never actually took place but created out of my imagination!! But it's a good one, nevertheless! I loved those horses and I think I really did it, so I'll keep the movie!!)
Sometimes my mom drove the pick-up truck back and forth as needed to work the pulley. I'm sure that was to give the horse a break, after working in the hot field. They had to make many trips back and forth from field to barn in the course of a day's work during the busy haying season. My dad never brought "green" hay into the barn. He always let it dry in the field three days. After it was cut, it had to be turned at least once or twice to make sure it was totally dry. "Green" hay in the hayloft could produce internal combustion and Dad wouldn't take any chance of getting a fire started in his hay.
Someone had to be up in the hayloft to distribute the hay when it was released from the fork. What a hot job that must have been. Haying season was in July and of course the work was done on days when the weather was totally dry. A farmer had to be a weatherman. He always looked ahead to see what the weather was predicted to be. He didn't want rain to fall on mown hay, so he was always hoping for several hot days in a row in which to get the hay into the barn.
My dad had to bring in a lot of hay, even though compared to the huge farms today, it wouldn't seem like much. But he had to have enough hay to feed the cows and horses for the entire winter until the grass sprouted back up in the spring. Then my dad would turn the cows out to pasture and bring them in only for milking. The cows always knew when milking time was and were usually not far from the barn door at those two times of day. The horses weren't turned out to pasture, because they were usually working. But my dad never asked them to work harder than they were able. He loved his animals. Sandy and Colonel were his pets, even though they were his co-workers!
The horses' stall was on the back side of the barn. There was a window or two looking out into the back pasture. One day we had a visiting horse who just happened to stop by. She evidently heard our horses, and so she wandered into that pasture. When we saw her, my dad closed the gate so she wouldn't leave until we found her owner. I don't remember how we found him, but in a few days, her owner came by and took her home.
It seems very sad to me, that a person can't make a living or or at least supplement with a small dairy farm today. The milk can method is obsolete. If my dad hadn't been of retirement age at that time, he would have had to expand his operations. Bulk milk tanks were becoming the thing and the small dairy farmer who was using the cans for pick-up was soon to be phased out of business.
The cows and horses were a big part of my days for the first twelve years of my life! My dad sold his farm and retired in April of 1961, but I have very fond memories of living on the farm. (You can take the girl out of the farm, but you cannot take the farm out of this girl!)
And so for now, Good-bye and God Bless! and
May the God of peace be with you all. Amen. Romans 15:33
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