We were fortunate as kids to have relatives who lived on a farm. The farm was located in Troy, Ohio, which was about an 8 hour car drive from our house. I'm still not sure what their relation was to our family. I believe they were like 3rd or 4th cousins. All I remember is they always seemed a bit surprised when my father's car pulled up to their farmhouse. I kind of think my father forgot on occasion to tell them we were coming. At at least once, I remember my dad bringing some type of official document from the courthouse with him to show them that we were indeed related.
The last time we went there was in 1960. I was 13 and my brother was 11. We brought a friend along with us for that final trip. For us urbanites, going to the farm was like visiting an alien landscape. They had cows there, a bull, some sheep, and lots of chickens. Besides the farmhouse, they had a full fledged barn with tractors, tools, and a hayloft.
The barn would always be our first destination upon our arrival. While my father, stepmother, and our older cousins were examining the court documents, we'd run to the barn. Once there, we'd play around on the tractor, find hiding places in the hayloft, and look for bats and toads.
They had many acres of property. Cornfields covered a good bit of it. The cornstalks were always high and abundant during those summer days, and we'd spend hours during the day wandering through the corn rows trying to get lost, and somtimes succeeding.
Dinner was always our favorite time of day there because the food was always so fresh. That was a genuine treat for boys who normally subsisted on leftovers. The vegetables were always picked fresh in the morning and, though I never witnessed it, I imagine the chicken was too.
My brother, friend, and I even enjoyed getting up at the crack of dawn to feed the animals and gather up chicken eggs.
We would normally spend about a week on the farm before going back to the land of asphalt and concrete, but each of us loved the time we spent there. It cleansed us, recharged us, and gave us great stories to tell our friends and classmates.
My father also liked to camp and, for two or three years in the early '60s, would take my brother and I camping.
The trips would only last two or three days, but they would always be thrill packed. I saw my first eagle on a camping trip. It flew directly over our car on a small dirt road. For an instant, it's shadow blotted out the sun. Then it was ahead of us, flying slowly, the tips of it's wings nearly touching the trees on either side of the road.
I also saw my first bear that wasn't caged. It was at night. My father, my brother, and I were talking around the small campfire over the babbling of a stream a short distance away. We suddenly heard loud splashing from the water nearby. My father concentrated his flashlight beam on the running water. There was a bear, a big one, holding a fish in it's huge paw, staring back at us.
My father calmly, and without saying a word, turned off the flashlight, got up, strolled to his tent and zippered it all the way up. I guess he forgot about my brother and I, left to fend for ourselves. Not to worry. We did the same thiing with our tent, only faster.
One time, my father and I went exploring in a wooded area in Pennsylvania known as New Germany. After trekking for a while, we realized we were hopelessly lost. I remember that we climbed a tall hill, hoping to get our bearings. As we neared the hill's crest, we began to smell something peculiar, like rotten garbage. When we reached the top we saw the reason for the odor. We were on the far side of an expansive landfill.
We eventually were able to hitch a ride to our campsite on the back of an empty garbage truck. Despite the smell, riding on the back of that garbage truck with my father was the highlight of that summer.
Not many summers after that, my father passed away. It's these memories that you hold on to, tightly.