The Thompson Farm, Part Three

Grampa's barn was not one of the rounded ones, but it was painted classic barn red. Its peak was off-center with the east side shorter. That was the side with the concrete ramp down to the yard where the pigs lived. There was a gate, usually open, leading out to a big pasture with lots of oak trees. Most of the east half of the farm was wooded, with elm, oak, crabapple, ash and many other kinds of trees. All the pastures were on the east half, except the little one just west of the house and a paddock on the west side of the barn. When you went in the door on the south, facing the house, the barn was quiet and dim and smelled of hay and cows and pigs. Now these livestock odors were not strong. Grampa kept a relatively clean barn and the fragrances were pleasant. Immediately on the left was a big "room" where the horses used to live. They could move around in there and were not confined to stalls, even box stalls. Unfortunately, the horses had been gone so long that even their fragrance had disappeared, although there were bits of their tack around. If you went straight ahead, you entered the big room where the cows were milked once upon a time. The stanchions were still there, but by the time I was born, Grampa no longer kept cows that required milking. He did keep heifers for Uncle Bob who did have a dairy farm. What are heifers? They are young females of the bovine species who have not yet had a calf and therefore do not yet give milk. They may or may not be pregnant. Uncle Bob would bring his bred heifers over to pasture on Grampa's fields until they were about ready to calve. They have a nine-month gestation just like people. (Horses are pregnant for about eleven months before foaling, in case you wondered.) We would often play with the heifers and sometimes ride them, but their spines stick up and are very sharp and uncomfortable to sit on. Up above these "rooms" was the hayloft where the bales of hay were stacked. This was a wonderful place to play, but we had to be careful not to break the bales. If Grampa noticed any damage, we would be banished from this relatively cool and shady spot. There were also often kittens born in the hayloft and they were extra fun. Pigeons would fly around up there and swallows and sometimes a barn owl would make its home up near the roof. Just outside the barn near the northwest corner was the old silo. Farmers use silos to make silage, which is cornstalks cut when they are still green and layered flat in the silo and allowed to ferment. Then this silage is fed to the cows in the winter when there is nothing else green available for them to eat. It's sort of like sauerkraut. You can store other things, like grains, in silos, but this was the most common use. In the paddock west of the barn was the corn crib. This structure was maybe thirty feet long and six feet wide and ten feet high, made of woven wire except for the floor, which was solid. In this Grampa stored dried ears of corn to feed to the animals, especially the pigs. Horses like it as much as we like candy, too. The crib had to be well ventilated or the corn would go moldy. Squirrels and other varmints were always trying to get into the corn crib and it was not rare to hear the sound of a 22 when Grampa caught one. Then west of the paddock was the windbreak mentioned earlier. Along the west side of that ran the main tractor path out to the fields. The fields were not fenced, except along property lines, but had these paths between them so they were accessible by tractor. Grampa had different sizes of fields and rotated his crops according to the needs of the soil and the market he expected to have for corn, soybeans, wheat, barley, oats and alfalfa. The farm was divided about half and half between pastures for livestock and fields of crops, with a small part taken out for the house and barnyard. I forgot to tell about the sheep sheds east of the tractor shed, machine shed and granary. The sheep did not usually go into these buildings in good weather, so we could play in and on them. Their roofs did not slope much and they made great stages when we wanted to put on shows for our own benefit. I remember one time when Uncle Bill's daughter Carol Ann and Uncle Bob's daughter Charlotte, who were both a year older than I was, were also visiting and we got up on the roof of one of the sheds and Carol entertained us by singing and dancing to some old songs. She was pretty good. Char and I were too shy to do stuff like that, but I think Sue did some performing as well. Once when we went down to the sheep sheds, we looked into one of them and there were three rats sitting up in a group like they were having a conversation. Each was a different color, gray and brown and tan, and they were incredibly big, as big as cats! There was a windmill by the horse water tank and also a couple out in the pastures to fill the stock tanks out there. I still don't really understand how they work, but I always thought they were cool.