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God Bless America
By Jerry L. Ginther
My kneecaps were raw and bleeding slightly from being rubbed against the front of the old wagon as I did my best to steer the mule team. I was eleven or twelve years old and had been allowed to drive the team to and from the hay field some distance behind my Uncle Frank's dairy barn. The weight of the heavy lines and the force I had to exert on them to turn the mules necessitated my bracing against the front of the wagon. The turns in the lane were tight, and the lane was uneven, making the wagon roll slightly from side to side causing the rough wood to work like sandpaper on my knees. Perhaps wearing shorts on that day was not the best choice of clothing for working in the hay field.
I wasn't a muleskinner yet, but I would have willingly bled to death through my skinny skinned knees before I would have given up the job. Anytime I could go to the field with the men folk and drive a team, or ride on a tractor, they didn't have to wait for me; I was an enthusiastic participant. The alternative would have been to stay at the house with the women and listen to their conversations about recipes, quilting and their aches and pains. Even in my preteen years I'd heard enough of that to sustain me for the foreseeable future. The men folk were doing more interesting things.
My Uncle Frank Stilwell and Aunt Neely owned the one hundred acre farm located just outside Hardinsburg, KY. Uncle Frank was a brother to my maternal grandmother, so actually he was my great uncle. They, and twelve other siblings, had grown up in that rather small house. The farm had been passed down to Frank from his father, and he had turned the acreage into a dairy and tobacco farm. Also, there were a few acres occupied by the Durham and Stilwell family's cemetery.
My first visit to the farm was as a small child, probably between one and two years old. So young was I at the time that I have no recollection of that trip. I've been told that at the time of the visit, the road back to the farmhouse was in such bad repair, with deep ruts and high centers, that an automobile could not be driven on it. Instead, we were met at the main road by Uncle Frank with the mules and transported to the house in a wagon. I had my first ride in a wagon pulled by mules before I was old enough to appreciate it. Had I been older, I would probably have regarded it as quite an adventure. However, they were the same mules I would delight in driving many years later.
Another of Grandma's brothers was Uncle Herman, and guess what. He also had a team of mules and a hay field! But, he also had something else a boy my age found interesting: a tractor. He had the mules, but he taught me how to drive the tractor and he'd let me drive it all day if I wanted to. For some reason, after that, I sort of lost interest in the mules. I was still hauling hay from a field, but the tractor seat wasn't skinning my knees like the front end of a wagon did. Also, the tractor was much easier to steer than the mules were.
The two major drawbacks to the tractor were that it couldn't see where it was going, and it didn't stop when I hollered, "Whoa!" The vision problem would become an issue when Uncle allowed me to try my hand at cultivating corn. After I had plowed up about half of the corn in my first pass through the field with the rear-mounted cultivator, he decided that maybe he couldn't tolerate anymore of his nephew's practicing in his cornfield. Sadly, I was relieved of my job, but reassured that I didn't do, "too badly for my first try." I took that as a positive statement, after all I could have plowed up all of it.
Years later, after I married, we visited the Kentucky relatives on several occasions, and they never tired of telling my wife the things I did as a boy during my summer visits. It's great to have a big family, when they remember you affectionately and don't tell your wife everything.
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