"Life on the Farm: Part Four"

You can hide a TV and VCR in a basket of clothes. Again, and again, and again.

Listening to “Paul Harvey” on the way to seminary with Dad was the highlight of the day, except Rufus, the Bear stories.

Snitching marshmallows, chocolate chips, cookies, cooking chocolates, etc. from the freezer and seeing how much you could eat before Mom found out was a favorite past time.

If you stick your head between the wall and the freezer, it will get stuck.

The story of a tornado coming and ripping the screen off a window when Mom and Dad are out of town carrying it away was a great cover up story, only adding to our mystery we were playing when we were pretending to be Nancy Drew and cutting the screen off a window to get back in the house.

Filling the exhaust pipe for the bathroom with tomatoes is NOT a good way of showing Mom you loved the tomatoes that she was handing to you through the window, as you were saying, “Mmmmm, these are so good.”

The wooden cross beams on Mom and Dad’s bed are not good trapeze apparatuses when jumping from Dad’s armoire to the bed.

If you ran in and did your business quick enough with a diaper in the toilet, you were sure it just mixed and Mom would never know.

The outhouse was a great place to dump things that we KNEW would be irretrievable and never found again.

Mom’s garage door was more fun than a county fair carnival ride if you hung on to the handle while your sister yanked you up and down.

When cousins came, they were labeled “stupid, city cousins” because they couldn’t run along the fence without falling and scraping themselves to pieces.

Letting your friend call you and leave the phone to ring for 100 times hoping it will “wake up” Mom from the couch never worked.

Listening to “Bill Cosby” or the Jewish records while canning was a much looked forward to event.

Having the food storage room next to one’s bedroom made it extra convenient to enjoy the “fruits” of Mom’s labors and supplied great ammunition for spitting contests to see who could hit the pictures on the other side of the room with cherry pits.

It was more fun to go to the dump with Dad on Saturday morning than staying at home and
doing chores with Mom.