I have always loved Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer.”  When it was featured in a Super Bowl commercial years three years ago ~ it brought me to my knees.  I am blessed and honored to have grown up on a farm in Ohio and to have known many amazing farmers.  They are a special group, a fraternity of hard working, strong, dependable, salt-of–the-earth men.

Today is the 6th anniversary of my Dad’s passing and not a day goes by that I don’t think about him.  The pain of missing him will never go away but as a tribute, I try to live my life in the way that he taught me from a very early age.

I stumbled upon this blog post, “So God Made a Farmers Daughter” a while ago.  It’s impossible for me to read the post without getting emotional, as it is my childhood.  It is how I grew up and now more than ever, I understand how living and working on a farm impacted my life.

My Dad farmed for many years.  I have memories of my mom getting me out of bed early in the morning and putting me in my Dad’s truck.  My mom worked at a bank so my Dad took me to work with him on Emery’s farm.  Emery was like a second father to my Dad and like a grandpa to me ~ even though we were not blood related, we were family.  He would drop me at the house and I would sleep on Pauline’s couch while my Dad went out into the fields.  I would entertain myself all day ~ playing in the yard, helping with the chickens and I would spend hours pretending I knew how to play the piano.  Pauline was a saint.  All that pounding on the piano  must have driven her crazy but she never said a word.  Emery and my Dad and the other workers would come in for “dinner” and it would be full meal – meat, potatoes, gravy and always a homemade pie.  They never would have considered having chips and sandwiches for their mid day meal.  Later in the day, we would take jugs of cold water and cookies out to the fields for the guys.

Some days my Dad would let me ride the tractor with him, which was a big deal.  I loved being in the fields and most importantly being with him.

One of the best days of my life was when I was in third grade; we bought our own farm up on the hill!  It was a dream come true for my family.  On the day we moved in, I got my first pony, Ginger. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  I was the luckiest girl in the whole world and then it just got better and better.  We cleaned out the old dilapidated barn, painted it and built stalls.  We got baby calves and every morning, my brother and I would get up before school and carry buckets of hot water out to the barn to feed the calves.  I then got a horse named Satan ~(I am not kidding) and on the first day we brought him home, I got bucked off.  It scared the crap out of me. My dad made me get right back on the horse to show him who was boss.  (To be honest, he tried to get me right back on, but  I was stubborn and petrified, so it was a couple of weeks before I actually  “got back on the horse.”)

This is Satan.

I had a lamb named Cuddles that I raised in the house.  When an ewe has more than one lamb, many times she will only claim one baby. So my Dad brought a lamb home from Emery’s farm and I kept it in the barn.  I had to bottle feed her three times a day.  We made a nice pen in the barn to keep the lamb warm and every time I went to feed her, I would open the barn door and hear her crying.  One cold morning when I opened the barn door, the lamb wasn’t crying.  She had died.  The next day my Dad brought another lamb home and this time I convinced him to let me keep her in the house.  I trained her just like a dog – she wore a collar and we would tie her to the clothesline so that she could run up and down in the yard.  She was house broken and could literally jump across my parents bed in one hop.  And yes, I did take her to school one day for show and tell.  Eventually she got very big and had to join the cows in the barn.

I bought my first baby calf for $50 and named her Snowball.  She was all white with a black face. My Dad let my brother and me buy our own calves and he would pay for the feed but we had to take care of all the cows in return.  The idea was that we would then sell them and be able to make some money.  It seemed like a good idea until the day the sale barn truck came to get Snowball ~ I couldn’t take it and my dad had to send me into the house as I was crying so hard.  From that point forward, I never named my calves as it made it just too painful to sell them.  These were important life lessons and the values that I learned early.

We had a huge, beautiful garden and  grew enough produce to feed the whole town of Greenville.  My papaw worked in our garden every day.  During the summer, I had to work in the garden every day.  Pulling weeds was not my favorite job nor was digging potatoes, but we did it together ~ my mom and dad, my brother and my grandma and papaw ~ all working side-by-side and then we would sit around and clean the vegetables and my mom would make a big dinner.  There were a lot of meals on the farm and a lot of dishes!

We ate supper together every night ~ no matter how late my Dad worked.  We waited until he was home and we sat down at the table together for our meal.  I miss him ~ I miss those times.  I miss the connections and I miss how simple and pure life was on the farm.

Life was good and it was always about family and hard work and it was truly the most cherished childhood anyone could hope for.

This is my last photo of my Dad and me on the farm together.

I am my father’s daughter ~ I am a farmer’s daughter and I am grateful for the journey.

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/so-god-made-farmers-daughter

Read it here