The Straight Farm

 THE STRAIGHT FARM

When we lived here we only had an outside toilet,  It was OK in the summer time, but in the winter it was not so nice going through the snow, and the wind would sometimes blow through the cracks in the door and make little snow drifts.  I remember when my dad made a small room on the back porch and put in a toilet stool. but no running water so we had to carry water to flush with. This room had no heat but it was better than going out side.  

I took my bath in a wash tub in the kitchen because it was the warmest room in the house and that was not the best sometimes. We had a wood burning stove in the kitchen and a coal burning pot bellied stove in the living room and they would heat the whole house. We would close off any room that was not needed.  

When my mother would build a fire she would put some fuel oil on the kindling and sometimes we would have a small explosion, and sometimes she would get that pot bellied stove red hot getting the house warmed up.  

I got my first shot gun here. It was a 44 caliber rifle bored out to a 410 caliber shot gun (single shot).  I got it from my cousin Ralph Till when he got a new one.  The first time I went hunting I got a pheasant.  I was in the corn field and saw the pheasant running down the corn row ahead of me so I ran after it.  When it took off I shot just as it was at the top of the corn stalks.

One time when my dad and I were getting some corn stalks from the field to the barn to feed the cows, a field mouse ran up my dad’s pant leg. My dad always wore bib overalls, and I remember Dad grabbing his overalls in the chest area catching the mouse and squeezing it until it was dead.  

I remember lots of things about this place. One was the time I almost fell off the wind mill, I was playing with a handkerchief made like a parachute so I thought I would climb to the top of our wind mill and throw it up from there and it would go a long way. Well when  I was in the process of this I almost fell off the windmill. This scares me to tell this now.