Cleaning the Barn

It was our chore (Donald and mine) to clean the barn after the cows were milked, which meant shoveling fresh manure, into a wheel barrel that Daddy made that was quite rickety. You had to practically be an acrobat to use it. Donald had an idea to clean out the manure by making a sort of conveyor, but of course we didn't have the necessary equipment. So we loaded up the rickety wheel barrel and took turns. When he was in the manure pit shoveling, he'd shovel on a few extra piles and I'd say, "That's enough! That's enough!" and when I'd wheel it up to the pile I'd end up stumbling into manure since the wheel barrel would tip over and cause knee high cow manure.

One time when he did this, I lost my cool and rubbed cow shit in his mouth. That made him mad, and he went into the house and told my mom what I'd done. After that, the job was mine alone.

That was an ongoing situation. We always had cows, therefore manure. In the wintertime if you left it too long it would freeze up like ice, and you'd have a real problem cleaning the barn. Lots of times, my mother did that job, and of course so did my dad. But usually he was off working for cash flow and Ma was busy doing labor at home. It was often times our job in the wintertime to throw the hay down to the cows to feed them. Ma had an uncanny time of rationing the hay so that we'd have cows in the springtime even though they were all losing weight from the scant feed. Once Spring came we'd turn the cows out to pasture.