Don’t let my rose-colored nostalgia fool you–growing up on the farm was far from glamorous.  It’s easy to romanticize country life from my leather couch and pink laptop…so here’s a really random and honest assortment of not-so-glamorous moments.

Let me tell you about Thursdays, when Uncle Kent drained the chicken manure pits with the honey wagon, and then spread the manure all over the fields that surrounded our house. Somehow, the wind always picked up a bit on those afternoons and made sure that all of Woodford County smelled that yumminess.

One interesting challenge is trying to tie a sheep to the swing set in order to shampoo it before the 4-H fair, just so that it could inevitably take a dump later and sit in it.  Rarely was one shampoo at home enough for the show ring.

One of the most horrific days in country life is “butchering day,” which consequently fell every year around my birthday.  It was always a hot, humid day in early July, and we’d roll out of bed at the crack of dawn to chop off chicken heads, drain the blood in a cone-shaped device, run the warm bodies through the plucker and then into cold tubs of water to start to cool.  One of my tasks as a child? Helping bury the chicken feet in the pasture, because it was the only part of the chicken that we couldn’t use or dispose of any other way.  You don’t want to know some of the parts that mom would cook up for us to eat.

That leads me to squirrel stew–I remember a winter when mom was trying to do one of the following–be really creative with meals, encourage my brother Jeff’s hunting skills, or hone her skills in frugality.  Regardless, we ate whatever Jeff shot, skinned, and brought home.  I think the greasiness of the squirrel stew that year was even worse than the opossum, and I only remember escaping to the cellar with Joyce and our peanut butter sandwiches.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.