Growing up, the house we lived in was an old farmhouse built in the late 1700’s that my father had heard about one day traveling to or from a job site.  He had been born and raised in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of New York and, although he was given much advice on where on the Island he should take his family, he opted to buy the house on the hill in Upstate New York and, one day in 1965, there we moved.  He loved and cursed the country with equal ambivalent enthusiasm, planting flowers and vegetables wherever he could stick a seed and bought animals with Noah-ish abandon as a knee jerk reaction to being in the country.  There was a pony named Trotter, a pig named Arnold, ducks, rabbits, chickens and too many dogs and cats through the years to name.   He was suddenly Bed Sty’s version of Ben Cartright with a previously unthinkable five acres and he treasured being a landowner.  As much as he loved the property, he hated being surrounded by his new upstate neighbors, calling them hillbillies.  He continually groused about their slow, relaxed attitude and ability to shrug off stressful situations with a calm “aw heck”, often prompting him to say that civilization ended at Yonkers. 

Those same people were amused by their new neighbors and the weird way they thought we did things.  For example, they talked about our clumsy approach to pig catching by doing so while swearing and falling on our backsides constantly.  The losing of the pony through a new break in the fence every few weeks, then buying him back for the cost of oats and storage every time from the enterprising neighbor who owned the adjacent property was cause for gossip and giggles.  The feeding of the local fox population with our ducks and chickens was a popular coffee clutch topic of conversation at the general store, as was the one about the chicken that died standing on one leg found one morning, obviously suspicious of the fate that awaited her.  Buying animals about which he knew nothing was unfortunate.  Pretending to be an animal as he did when it came to the Easter bunny was done lovingly by this man, always claiming not to know where the final hidden eggs might have been since he refused to admit he had hidden them.  This ruse was understandable in my youth, but as the egg hunts continued into my thirties for my own children, it seemed an unnecessary expenditure of energy with which he obviously still enjoyed teasing me.  Bad bunny.  
One of only two times I ever remember my father spanking me was when I was very young after I striped my older brother’s bright yellow dresser with black shoe polish in what I thought was a fun, bumblebee design, and denied I had done it when my father asked about it.  While he was spanking me he said, “You know that you’re not getting spanked for what you did to the dresser, but for lying about it.”  It hurt just as much as if I had been hit for the dresser alone, and I didn’t understand that subtle difference in reasoning until years later.  
The other spanking was when I tried to steal a slim jim from the grocery store and my father heard the cellophane wrapper rattling under my shirt sleeve where I had hidden it.  Busted!!!  Not only did he spank me in front of all the other customers, but he made me bring it up to the cashier to pay for it and tell what I had done.  Apparently stealing was right up there with lying as far as my father was concerned and I was eventually glad that it was, regardless of how unhappy I was about it at the time.