One journal question I posed to my mom was, “What did kids do for fun living on the farm?”
From Irene:
I’m sure we had more fun than the town kids. That’s why they would stay with us on the weekends.
We’d jump down from the haymow into the mangers below filled with straw for the horses. The mangers were great for hide-and-seek.
We loved water fights. We all had big buckets and filled them with water from a huge tank in the livestock section of the barn. The town kids would get soaked because they didn’t know all the secret hiding spots.
I learned to ride horses when I could barely walk. Dad would put me on the horse and walk along beside until I got the hang of it. I named my favorite horse Daisy.
My brothers learned to box from my dad when they were very young. When the town boys came out, there would be one-sided boxing matches. Mom would rush out from the kitchen if she felt things were getting too rough.
Irene filled up 11 pages of fun things she did as a girl on the farm.
She continued to do fun stuff well into her 80s.