Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Thanks, Dad!

Thanks, Dad.

My wife, Barbara, and I just returned from clearing a fence-row on, now, our Doster Road farm ten miles away.  I brought home a piece of old, silver, not rusted, barb wire. I'm writing this story to share with our kids and grandkids, who will become the eighth generation of our family to own some of that farm.

Stringing that wire above all his fences was one of the last jobs my, then, over 80-year old Dad did.  I remember he could still drive his little Massey-Ferguson tractor, including along the fence rows.  Soon after Dad died at age 85, my brother sold the cows.  I doubt that some of the fields had cows in them after Dad put up the new wire.

It didn't matter.  Dad had faithfully fixed up the fences that he, himself, had constructed, soon after he and his brother bought the mostly wooded land in 1926 from their cousins for perhaps $12 per acre.  He was one of the last farmers around here to have cleared most of his own farm.

I'm now 80.  Although I'm still playing eight softball games a week, and Mom didn't decide to die until she was 105, I know we'll not harvest the young walnut trees Barbara and I pruned at the farm again this spring.  That's OK.  Perhaps some of our kids and grandkids will tell their grandkids we had fun as we were also thinking of them.

D. Howard Doster   (April 30, 2013)