On the Moraine, Part XXVI

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

We had one more scare in the spring of 1963. Mother got a lump on a breast. Need to pause and explain here for a minute. In those days, people didn’t talk about body parts like they do today. At the age of my brother and I, we did not acknowledge nor were we expected to acknowledge that breasts existed, especially when it came to our mother.

Dad and Mother, still Troy-centric, went to Troy for treatment. She was in the hospital there and her surgery was scheduled for a Saturday. John and I were dropped off at the reliable Harold Wagoner home for the day.  

Dad got back very late that night. On Sunday, we went to Troy to see Mother. Children weren’t allowed in the adult rooms in those days, but  Dad was able to bring her to the lobby in a wheelchair.

After we saw Mother, we went to Flash’s restaurant on East Main Street in Troy. I had shrimp for the first time. Still like them. Mother came home in a couple of days, and she recovered without incident. Her lump was benign.

We moved the forge from the McNary Farm to a bay in the machinery shed at the north side of the homestead on the Beaver Farm. As I remember, that was about the last thing we moved that spring. We left the Allis Chalmers 60 combine over at the McNary Farm because we had a shed there where it just fit.

After Mother recovered and things got back to normal, spring had arrived. After supper, on the evenings when it was pleasant, Mother would go out behind the Granary, sit on the high creek bank there and call our three flighty cows. I told her she was wasting her time. 
 
Sometimes you couldn’t even see the cows, the pasture was so big, and they could be on the backside of a hill on the other side of the creek. But, by golly, after doing that for a couple of weeks, they would come to the valley on the other side of the creek and moo at her.

We farmed mostly with the Case that spring, but I would run the John Deere dragging after Dad had plowed. Dragging plowed ground is a rough ride. You know what I am talking about if you have ever done it.

We had taken out the fence between two 20-acre fields and made one large field out of them. We had an old horse-drawn two row corn planter. It still had a seat for a horse driver. John would sit there while Dad drove the tractor. With that little machine, it didn’t seem like they made much progress, but they finally got that field planted.

As summer came, Floyd Grover gave us a call and asked if I wanted to work putting up hay. I said sure, but that I was just a skinny little kid, I might not be worth much (I was almost 13, weighed about 110 lbs.). 

At the end of the first day, like every day, he paid me with a check written with a pencil. He paid me a dollar an hour, just like the older kids. I was very proud to be treated like the older kids.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.