The horse was in shock. It didn’t know what had happened to it as it could not comprehend just what was going on, and the farmer to whom it belonged, could only stare with a similar level of incomprehension. Standing at the gate, as ‘Bessie’ a retired Haflinger horse, lay on her side in watery mud in the corner of a field, her legs cycling slowly, head moving around, eyes blinking, her heart pumping its last as it lay som...

It was that time of year. Miss Emily had planned her annual Halloween party. The farm was the perfect place for a scary good time. The farmhouse and all the outbuildings were over two hundred years old. The farm had been in her family for generations. It was a pretty big place to have lots of fun. The place had stayed pretty much original other than a modern kitchen and indoor plumbing and updated lights and wiring. The c...

0430 Military time, 8 year old Theo would wake up, clean up, put on his dungarees, and fill up with whatever Mama bought that week.  By 0515 get to the corner for the farm truck to come by. Everyone there was speaking another language, yet they came to know him well. Theo was from an old mold, they said. They all remembered starting work so young in "the Old Country." Some never spent a day in school. Life was to be worke...

"It was a beautiful kingdom," someone always began. I looked up from sweeping in response, hoping they continued about this 'kingdom.' They never did though, all I knew was, that it was the Kingdom of Thorns on the other side of the eastern mountain range. Nothing but spirits lived there now. "Because it was sacred ground, soaked with magic," the old blind woman, begging at the town market, always blurted out, when my cur...

The picture above is a few years old, but they are twins! We weren't supposed to start calving until January 8th, 2013, but as usual on the farm you never can tell; if there are twins involved then they are often early arrivals. It was around 1:00 pm when Ed called me saying a cow was calving and it was probably twins since she had twins last year, and she was early again. I got the pail and filled it with hot soapy water...

This is a tribute to my wonderful dog Brock. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was going to the dog pound to see if I could find an Airedale terrier. I had fallen in love with the breed when a friend of mine brought her Airedale to my house while visiting me. He had been one happy-go-lucky guy, and made a great impression on me. So years later, I had gotten a part Airedale-part Husky female; I called her Allysa. I had...

This story takes place at harvest time again. It was a time when our cell phone did not have great signal strength, as we are situated between two signal towers. It's better now but still not great.I was at home, and decided to give Ed a call to see if he needed anything or just to ask how he was doing. See, I am the perfect little farm wife. He had been clearing the field of flax straw at the time. I kept getting the mes...

As you probably know by now, I am an animal lover. Therefore hunters and I don't really get along well. The area we live in has been popular with hunters for who knows how long. The reason being, that the population is pretty sparse, and of course there is a lot of wildlife. The sloughs are usually loaded with all kinds of waterfowl. In the springtime, the Canadian geese come, followed closely behind by the swans.The swan...

The Beast is the older of our two grain trucks. I better describe it , so that you have a picture in your mind of what it really is like. Its a 1968 Dodge grain/dump truck, built like a tank, unlike the newer converted grain trucks that have been used on the highways. The capacity of the box is 16 tons and it has 20 gear shifts. The PTO runs the hydraulics that hoist up the box when you unload the grain. Don't tell anyone...

Well, I now finally had my goat. I had waited for this for an awfully long time. There was just one problem now. How was I going to get the dogs to accept her and vise versa ? I lay in bed that night, thinking up different scenarios, on how it was going to go down. The first thing I had to do was get her to trust me. That wasn't going to be easy, since I scared the living daylights out of her by dragging her around by the...

To set this story in the proper time and place, I have to take you back to my teen years. Back a few years to my first encounter with a goat. I was visiting a friend on the outskirts of the City. Margaret was getting us some nice cold drinks while I sat on the back steps of her house. She lived right next to a farm that had a pen full of goats, and I could see them from the steps. There looked to be at least a dozen of th...