City Girl

My dad's brother, Uncle Raymond, lived on the family farm with his mother in the big house next to his.   They added onto Grandma's when he got married.  It was connected but you had to go outside one house to get to the door of the other.  He and Aunt Betty had 5 children in a house the size of the living room and kitchen of my house.  All the kids slept in one bedroom, girls and boys, and on the other side of the closet Uncle Raymond and Aunt Betty had their bedroom.  Thank goodness bunk beds were invented!  In the kitchen was a sink, stove, refrigerator, and the slop pail, where all the garbage was put.  They dumped it every day or two, by dumping it in with their pigs.  Oh, by the way, the building for the pigs, chickens, and everything except the cows was only 2 car lengths away from their front door.  Anyway, the kitchen table was in the living room, two couches, a television, and a couple of very small kids chairs.  This was the second room of the house and the bathroom was next to the kitchen table.  Get the picture?  Tiny house.  We would go down to see them regularly and in the months of nice weather we usually ate outside.  The cow barns and silo were just across the driveway.  Well, I must confess, I am a true city girl, because eating outside across from the animal barns that held heaps of smelly, stinky, foul fresh steamy manure, did nothing to excite my appetite!  Even when we were in the house, it was the same fragrance, eud'de la poop!  When I would go get a glass of water--there was that ever so delightful slop bucket, OH YUM!  I did not mind going there to visit, but to eat was not pleasant.  A thought just came to me, if I ate all my meals there I would be much thinner today, now I think of that, too late.  When the corn crib was empty, or almost empty, that was where we played.  Falling, which I do allot, was painful.  The corn on those cobs were not as soft as when they were boiled to eat.  Lets just say this is where Iencountered my first mouse or maybe it was a rat.  To a little city girl, they are both traumatizing.  So playing there I was always tense, a little stressed out.  In the winter the smell was not as bad.  They had a ski-doo and the manure pile was like a mountain covered in snow and ice.  Oh, what fun times, but not for me.  The kids would ride the snow machine around the field again and again and again, then up and down the steep poop pile.  My question was, once you rode around the field once or twice, what was out there to see?  City girl!!  It was not my thing to get 20 layers of clothes on, go out in the freezing cold to get my face wind whipped and chapped to make circles in a field or ride up a pile of crap to have fun!  But my sister and my cousins were enchanted by this routine.  If I went into the house to sit, I was told not to be such a baby, get outside and play.  Sometimes I would just set on the porch steps and wait to go home and get warm.  I could have visited my grandma, but she was not so congenial, or pleasant, or friendly, like my mom's mother who lived with us.  Even Uncle Raymond said he enjoyed my mom's mother more than his own mom.  His mother did not have one gene in her DNA that held even a glimmer of humor.  There were plenty of genes in her that screamed ornery, crotchety, disagreeable etc..  This farm life was not my fragrance of life.  Check another career choice off my list!!