Image via Wikipedia

I grew up on a small farm across the street from a large lake where we also owned lake front property it was quite an experience has and stayed with me for all of my life. The farmer was my mother, my father was an engineer and was only home at night. He left for work at 6:00 am and left the running of the farm up to my mother along with a hired man or two, and us kids.

To this day I quail whenever I hear the words, “Weed the garden,” or a motherly command given like a Prussian Drill Sargent for something else that had to be done. If she needed something fixed we were handed a screwdriver and told to go fix it yourself. She never told us how we had to figure the fixing out ourself. In retrospect it was good training that lasted a lifetime.

Many years later I am still amazed at how many things that being raised on a farm imparts on a kid, for instance when was the last time you built a stone wall, or made maple syrup in the spring. I realized that my upbringing was unusual when I asked one of my fellow workers in a machine shop to hand me one of those things that looks like a stove poker. He replied, “I don’t know what a stove poker looks like!”

It seems that in our nation there are two kinds of people “City Slickers” and “Country Bumpkins.” The city slickers are always lording it over the country bumpkins because they have street smarts. Truth is that if they had to feed themselves they’d quickly find out who is smarter. When I was about nine years old we had a kid from Brooklyn staying with his parents in a cottage we owned. He was the same age I was, and we chummed around that summer when I wasn’t working on the farm.

One day I asked him where eggs came from, and he told me. “The supermarket.” Right then and there I decided to teach him a lesson about country living. We repaired to the henhouse where I looked to see what nest was occupied by one of the hens. Sure enough a big red hen was in one of the nests about to drop an egg. I told him to go up to the hen, and hold his hand just under her tail. The hen dropped her egg just as he put his hand there like she was on que. You never saw such a surprised look on a kid’s face as he had.

The experience of growing up on a farm has stayed with me for a whole lifetime, and I know that if it was ever necessary to grow my own food I’d be up to the job. How many city slickers can say the same.