Further Drama on the Farm

The only time in my life when I received a whipping occurred on the farm when I was maybe eight years old. My sister Sue (6), my cousins Charlotte and Carol Ann (both 9), and I were all staying there without our parents for a few days. This was a great time! We had so much fun, although Sue was enough younger than the rest of us that she was a bit of a drag. We would get up early in the morning, rush through breakfast, etc. and dash outside for adventures. One day we were called back into the house a couple of hours later, which was unusual. When we arrived we found water all over the kitchen floor, dripping through the ceiling from the bathroom. Apparently one of us girls had left the water running in the bathroom after breakfast and it had overflowed the sink, ruining the bathroom floor, kitchen ceiling and kitchen floor. They were mad! No one would admit to being the last one in the bathroom (I know I was not, but do not know who was.) so we all got whipped. Grampa used his razor strop (a heavy leather strap he honed his straight razor on) and left red marks on all our bare legs. I will never forget that--both the pain and the injustice of being punished for something I did not do.
One of the best times of my life happened on the farm, too. My cousin Charlotte, daughter of Uncle Bob the dairy farmer, had ponies and horses from the time she was six or seven. I would ride them when I visited their farm and really enjoyed that, of course, even if those ponies were spoiled brats who would stop suddenly when running to let us slide off over their heads or brush us off on fences or trees. When she was a little older, she got a mount that was a step up from them, a bay mare who was half quarter horse and half Shetland. Char called her Lady and I often got her to ride, but without a saddle. She had had several foals and was permanently very round. It was hard not to slip off her slick barrel! But she did not have any bad habits and was a lady of a horse. The next year I was going to stay on the farm for a month or so (I don't remember whether any sisters were there also.) and they decided to bring Lady and her new foal, Prince, over to Grampa's farm for me to enjoy during my stay. When they loaded them into the back of Uncle Bob's pickup, one of Prince's back feet slipped through the gap between the tailgate and the bed and got a bit scraped up. It was not serious, but we had to put medicine on it twice a day to fight infection. That was when I learned just how strong even a small horse is! But it was lovely to ride Lady the half-mile to the mailbox and back again with Prince scampering along around us. I fooled around with those horses most of the day the whole visit.
The summer after I was in the first grade Sue and I spent the whole vacation on the farm without our parents. Every Sunday Gramma and Grampa would go to church, I think at a Methodist church. It was much more formal than the services you have attended, with ladies in hats and gloves and babies in the nursery, not with the adults. I enjoyed those services and felt at home because during the school year I sang in the children's choir at our Methodist church about once a month. (That is, choir practice was every week, but we sang for services about once a month. The adult and youth choirs sang the rest of the time.) Well, I knew when to sit and when to stand and sang as loud as I could, even the hymns I did not know. I could read the words in the hymnal, though I did not always understand them. Grampa was impressed, but not enough to sing along, too.
There is one thing I took for granted back then, but am now rather mystified about. Every time we went to visit someone, which was often, for an hour or a week, expected or not, they would serve us coffee or milk, depending on age, and pie or cake or cookies. (Store-bought cookies were the last choice; usually housewives had home-baked pie or cake or at least cookies on hand.) How were those women able to keep those supplies on hand at all times? There was always enough to go around. It is a mystery to me.