CV Memories of Wayne Woodruff -Page 5

MEMORIES PAGE 5
Watching my parents, especially father, put up with the hard work, stress and worry of farming determined me not to be a farmer. I especially remember the night that Dad worked until one a.m. combining the soy bean crop because it was ready, we needed the money and there was a big storm coming that would ruin the beans. And getting the bales of alfalfa off the field and into the barn before more rain was another on-going worry and stress that I believe must have contributed to his early heart attack, He seemed always to have something to worry about, and work that had to be done.
Besides picking strawberries, there were other things about the farming that I hated. Gathering the eggs was one.! The procedure was to go into the chicken house, located the nests where the hens were laying eggs, reach into the nest and pick out the eggs that had been deposited during the day. At best, you grabbed an egg that some chicken had decided was not her best work and she had also defecated on the egg, so you grabbed a handful of chicken-sh-t. That was bad enough, but at times in the dark evening of the dark chicken house, one would reach into the nest and encounter the unwelcome contact with a four foot black-snake that was taking his evening meal of raw egg. But even when there was no snake and no sh-t, there were times when the hen was still on the nest and she objected violently to anyone trying to reach a hand in under her to steal her eggs, and I still have little scars on my hands from those sharp beaks.
Hoeing corn rows, some of them a half a mile long, in the heat of the summer for 50 cents an hour was another task that embedded itself in my mind so that when school work seemed too much, I could always remember those long, hot, dirty rows of corn and the hoe that never seemed to be sharp enough.
Milking the cows was some good and some bad. When things were going well, it was almost peaceful sitting quietly on the little one legged milking stool with your head against the warm flank of the old cow as you gently extracted her diurnal contribution of milk. She didn’t seem to mind because she had her oats to eat while I milked and she was a contented cow. But there were times that milk cow Helen was in a bad mood and probably sore from mastitis ( although at the time I did not know that and just thought that she was a nasty beast) and objected to this mean kid pulling on her teats and making her hurt. So, consequently she tried to kick the source of her agony, which was me. If not kicking me, she could always manage to kick over the almost full bucket of milk. But we did have a device that were called “kickers”. Kickers were clamps that fastened around each hind leg and a short chain between the clamps that kept the cow from kicking with one leg. But that ingenious device did not hamper old Helen. She learned to kick with both legs at one time which was quite picturesque but not very smart because when both of her back legs were in the air kicking at her tormenter, it meant she was totally without any means of balancing upright and ended up lying of the floor in the puddle of her own mess and usually a bucket of milk ,her head still caught in the stanchion, which were two heavy boards mounted vertically which kept her head in place during the milking procedure. Getting the poor cow out of this predicament with her fighting every effort was never any fun. One more reason to never be a farmer.
As mentioned earlier, I had a little sister, Barbara, who was four years younger. She was a brilliant pianist and even though I struggled for days trudging though a Chopin sonata, she could sit down at the instrument and play it beautifully the first time through.