Working and Playing

Johnny Miller spent the first eight years of his life "on the farm". The Miller family had homesteaded several plots of land back in the last half of the eighteen hundreds. Over the years, as the family grew up and grew apart, the original homesteads were sold to other folks. Johnny's parent's land was the last of the original homesteads still owned by Millers.

When he was very young, the Millers had a milk cow and a few other cows and calves. Once in a while, one of the Momma cows would go off and hide in the thicket with her newborn calf, and the family would have to search, sometimes for hours, to find where she was hidden, and make sure the calf was all right.

Of course, over the years they also raised a few pigs and chickens. Back behind the old house, inside the fence, they had built a chicken coop. It was divided into two sections. An old sheet-metal nesting box out of a chicken house somewhere had been placed there for the chickens.

At one point, they got some ducks, and placed them in the other side of the pen. Johnny's favorite was a small, gray duck, with twin yellow stripes. He named this one "Super Duck" for the cape running down its back. The ducks spent most of their time nesting in the old chicken coops, and one morning Johnny had gone into the coop to feed them, and found that his little Super Duck had gotten caught under a bent up piece of the sheet metal, and his back was torn open and bleeding. It was pretty bad!

Johnny was very upset, and kept asking his Momma if Super Duck was going to be all right. She'd not say that he was, she just said that they'd do what they could and let God do the rest. She cleaned the cut as best she could and Super Duck made a complete recovery and life on the farm was good.

The Miller family used to grow lots of crops in their gardens. Johnny's Dad dug an area down a few feet in the corner of the garden, and built a greenhouse of sorts out of rough cut 2x4 lumber and plastic sheeting. He could start growing tomatoes here and they'd be ready to sell early in the season. One late spring night, after the tomatoes had been planted, a late frost came in. The whole family got into high gear, looking for old tin cans and such to cover the young plants with. They'd take a large tin can, and tap a single hole in the center of the top, and place it on one of the young plants. Most of them survived the late frost, and one more source of income was preserved.

Johnny's Daddy also grew watermelons. He'd plow up the end of the field over by the old sweetgum tree, plowing first one direction, then across it, making large squares of fresh-cut earth. Johnny and his brothers and his sister would walk barefooted through this fresh-turned dirt and poke holes in the tops of the mounds, and plop a seed in, several to a mound. It was always fun to go out and watch for the first sign of the plants coming through the dirt, and even more fun when the watermelons were ripe and ready to pick! Dad would tap on the outside of the melons, listening to the hollow-sounding thump, and say, this one's ripe, or, not yet.

His Dad would load them up in the truck, and head to the farmers market, or make rounds, door to door. He'd sell many tomatoes and watermelons in those years. Whatever was spoiled, the boys or Dad would toss over the fence and let the cows, or the pigs, eat their fill.

There was a lot of work for the whole family in those days, but as hard as the family worked, they'd also take time to play. On rainy days, the marble board would come out. It was an eight-sided piece of painted plywood, with patterns of holes cut around the sides, and, of course, home rows to get your marbles to. The first one to get his marbles home would win.

Hours and hours of dominoes were played in the evenings. The kids would build towers in the living room with an old set, while the parents and other family members who happened to be there would play the real game in the dining room.

When weather was nicer, and the work all caught up, the family would take sandwiches up the old forest road and over the mountain to an old CCC project area that was now a forest service picnic area. The Springs had a pavilion, with a concrete floor and wooden roof and a couple of old picnic tables, set in the middle of the forest alongside a creek.

The best thing about this site was the blast of water which would come out of the ground just below the picnic table but above the creek. The water was pure and cold, and had been coming out of that hole for many, many years, and, no doubt, will continue to do so for many more.

Even when the family owned no television, there was little time for boredom. Whether the family was working together, playing together, or he was just reading a book, alone, Johnny had plenty to keep him busy.