Dusty Roads to the Heart

The book is ready. "Little by Little...Side by Side" will appear on my blog next week!! I will write one chapter a week until it is completed. The names have been changed for privacy purposes. I want to give a special thank you to my husband who helped me "remember" and who sometimes ate suppers alone and busied himself in the evenings so I could write. I also send a deep thank you to my dughter who edited all my chapters!! I can write but it stops there! Editing is not my thing! This book is dedicated too our six dear grandchildren and all our aunts, uncles and cousins who have missed out on our early years together. I want to share it with my many friends also. So I hope you will enjoy a book full of a young woman's feelings, hopes and dreams as she first became a young farm wife, then a mother and then a grandma. I hope you can laugh with her, cry with her, feel her excitment and her love for her husband, children, farm and nature. There is som...

What does a poor farmer do when he first has one daughter, then two years later another daughter, and then two years later another daughter. Then ten years later...guess what....a little son!! This was dad's story. I got to be the "boy" on some occasions. He did hire a young strong man for a few summers, but he took it upon himself to "try and teach me a few details about farming." To me it was FUN!! To him....well, I'll let you decide that at the end of this post!! Dad had a hog operation while we were growing up. It was a farrow to finish business. It wasn't fancy by any means. He had to work hard at it, but he enjoyed every minute. Dad loved animals and was very gentle with them, so his pigs got top care! His "farrowing barn" was an old white barn type building he remodeled into his farrowing barn. There was an aisle down the middle, and on both sides Dad had built five individual pens for each sow. In each individual pen he nai...

Have you ever learned a lesson from an animal? I know that sounds strange but this woman did just that a few weeks ago. I saw something happen out under the big blue sky that is forever engraved in my mind and has forever affected my heart and my thoughts. I did share this little story on face book, but I will repeat it for those of you who may have forgotten or those who did not get to read it. It is a picture I saw that cloudy day, one that neither my husband nor I have ever seen in our 40 years of farming. In this story I have seen a picture of how I myself could become a blessing in my lifetime. We were hauling our cows and calves to pasture, We had taken two trailor loads of momma's out and unloaded them. It was about impossible to get out the gate as those momma's came storming up there and tried to follow us out. They wanted their babies! On our second and last loads we had one of the trailors full of the mothers and in the other trailor was all the babies. Wh...

Yesterday my husband and I hooked the old red stock trailor to the pickup and headed up home to get the young bull we bought from an old school friend of mine. When we crossed over the Big Blue river bridge I asked,  "Oh honey....could we take the old river road? It is our old school bus route from years ago." "Where do we turn?" "Right here." Oh the memories came flying back as we wound this way and that following that Big Blue river. As we went around a corner, there setting off in the weeds and trees was a little farmstead of yesteryear. It's little farm house sets there with a window or two missing and its porch hanging lopsided. Out back, a small corral stood, its wood fence all weathered, some boards just held up at one end by a nail or two. Brown, dried up kosha weed mixed with a tree or two fills the lots. A big tree branch lays across a little two path lane leading into the yard full of over grown grass. Was that the home of...