The power of a dad in a child’s life is unmatched. ~Justin Ricklefs
It’s Father’s Day on the longest daylight day of the year, the summer solstice. That just gives us extra time to celebrate our dads. I hope you had a good dad the way I did. My dad was a farmer. His father was a farmer and his grandfathers were farmers. He grew up in a rural area when most everybody who lived around his family were people who made their living by farming. Some of the men had other jobs but they still farmed. Most all their wives were stay-at-home moms who raised gardens to put up food for their families and worked alongside their husbands in the fields. And the kids did too. From my perspective as one of those kids, it was a great way to grow up.
My dad raised tobacco and corn. He mowed and baled hay for his cows, mostly beef cows. He raised hogs for a hog killing in the fall for us to have food. He had sheep too that he sheared for the wool and sold the lambs, but we never ate mutton. He raised wheat. His dad had a bin in what once was their buggy house where they kept the wheat after it was threshed. When I was a kid I played in that wheat the way other kids might have played in a huge sandbox. Dad also had a cattle truck and at once time hauled cattle for other farmers or whatever else they had to sell or needed hauled back from the big city. His father farmed with horses, but Dad had tractors. His first tractor was an iron wheeled one that was retired to the middle of a pasture field when better models came along. I played on that too. Wish I had a picture of it now, but that was way before you had digital cameras that let you take pictures of whatever you saw without worrying about the cost of film and developing that film.
I did take the picture above when I was sixteen. My dad wasn’t one who liked to dress up. He had one suit that he kept for funerals. So this is the picture I took before we headed to my grandfather’s funeral. My grandfather was in his 90s when he died and had been sick and bedridden for several months after a stroke. So although I know Dad was sad, he was also glad his father wasn’t suffering anymore and had no problem smiling for the camera.
Dad was also very competitive. He loved playing cards. His favorite was Bridge but never had many who could play that with him. So mostly he played Rook. And he did like to win. He also pitched horseshoes and at one time said he made a high percentage of ringers. He would practice every day at the end of his work day. When he was retirement age he finally started competing in horseshoe events but was disappointed that he had lost some of his strength by then. He still won plenty of trophies. He also played competitive croquet on a clay court. I loved that because he played on Sunday afternoons in the same park as the swimming pool and I got to go swimming while he played.
So many memories of Dad. Helping him in the fields. Pulling the hay bales back away from the loft window so he could pitch more up in the loft from the wagon. Helping him herd the cows. Spending many hours in the dusty tobacco stripping room and hearing him talk about how he had to work when he was my age. He was a man who figured out how to do whatever he wanted to do. He built his own barns and other outbuildings. He repaired his machinery. He hauled rocks and cut firewood. He loved his family.
And he knew how to live a dream. When he was 21, he bought a motorcycle and rode across country to Oregon to visit relatives there. Maybe it’s from him that I inherited the courage to follow my own dream of writing stories.
I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week. ~Mario Cuomo
What you teach your children, you also teach their children. ~Unknown
A father is neither an anchor to hold us back nor a sail to take us there, but a guiding light whose love shows us the way. ~Unknown
What did your father teach you or share with you or what did he do to make you smile?