An Old New England Farm Boys Smile

Day 3 in my attempt to compile a compendium of commonly used Pepper Patch Phrases in order to bridge the gap between an image and a thousand words. (Thanksgiving edition).

"You made an old farm boy smile".

This one is fairly straightforward. I grew up on a small hardscrabble farm in New England. When I see your journal entries of the cattle or horses or pastures with animals that are scattered around your countrysides, they make me smile and I'm glad for it and want to say thank you.

It's always a compliment and always carries a star, sometimes a heart.

The backstory for today's pic (taken by my mother with a Kodak Brownie, the only camera I ever saw her with) was that my father was concerned that the family milk cow (our "cash crop" was goat milk and summer vegetables sold at our farm stand on the town road) was due to drop her calf at any minute and from the look and sound of her, it was likely to be a difficult birth. He decided to spend the night in the barn and I, really too young to be much help other than fetching things and carefully bringing cups of strong black coffee from the tin pot on the kitchen stove), spent the night with him, sleeping in the hay while we waited.

The next morning, nothing having happened yet, my father decided we could take enough of a break to grab a bit of breakfast in the house. As we sat at the kitchen table, finishing our bacon and eggs, my grandfather David (you met him the other day, he and my grandmother lived in a cottage at the bottom of our farm road) came in and complimented us on the beautiful new calf he had just seen in our barn. My father cussed and we rushed to the barn but Bertha, the milk cow, had apparently decided that with a little bit of privacy ...

Thanks for putting up with me as I wander quite so far afield (pun intended) with my project ... I'll let you in about where I'm taking this when the week is up. Stay safe, be kind, care for each other ... and the adventure through the viewfinder continues.

*extras, couple more from the farm.