...A 1949 Summer Morning...

My bedroom window had been left open just a crack last night. It was May and although the nights still got quite cool, we'd had a run of very warm weather this spring and everything was coming alive again. I heard the jingle jingle first...then...as they came closer...the clop clop of the huge Belgians' hooves on the gravel road became louder. I rushed to wash my face, brush my teeth, pull on my jeans and get outside to talk with Mr. Redpath.

We lived in a small bungalow on the top of the hill on Fox Street. The house is still there though it's green now rather than white. In high school at St. Thomas I wrote a poem about the little house which, to my absolute surprise, won a prize in a national contest. Across the street was a field of tall grasses, golden rod and milkweed that belonged to the Weber family. Today it's called Weber Hills...an appropriate name, I guess. There were no houses there in 1949...in fact...there were very few houses in the area at all.

Our house was on 10 acres. All the land was open grassland...surrounded by a three-strand barbed wire fence with wooden fence posts that were old even then. There had been beef cattle in the fields when we moved in. One day...trucks came and took them all away. The livestock evidently controlled what grew in the fields due to their grazing... for today...those grassy fields where, as a child on a sunny and warm day, I would lie on my back with my dog and watch the cottony clouds cruise by...have been replaced by fully grown groves of huge trees.

The house sat toward the front of the lot...set back perhaps 75 to 100 feet from the gravel road that Fox Street was then. A long gravel driveway curved around the west side of the house to the back yard where the garage sat. It had a tall sliding door and a wooden plank floor and sat above what had been a small barn for milk cows. Four or five old stanchions were still down there and straw covered the floor. Next to the garage was a very old chicken coop.

Mother had a clothesline toward the back of the yard...it seemed to me to be always full. I can still remember the delicious smell of the clean sheets dried in the sun and almost constant breeze that we enjoyed on top of the hill. My Dad had dug a garden, by hand with a shovel, not far away where we grew our vegetables. It was my job to cultivate it, pull whichever weeds escaped the hoe, and keep it watered. A side benefit of the garden was that it produced a great crop of earthworms, easily found and collected in a coffee can for fishing bait.

Mr. Redpath was a large man, red-faced from working in the sun and wind, with thick, strong hands. It seems to me now that he must have always worn his bib overalls...not the solid blue ones...but the ones with the white pinstripes...like a railroad engineer. His land abutted ours and he was here this morning to plow. His plow was powered by Bob and Jake, two enormous Belgian draft horses...one white...one grey. In fact, all of his farm implements were powered by Bob and Jake.

By the time I got outside, he had already made his first trip down the field...cutting and rolling the sod under the fresh-smelling spring earth...and was on his way back toward Fox Street. As he got closer he waived at me and wished me a good morning! He had a strong, loud voice.

Hi, Mr. Redpath, I said as I walked to the side of the plow that he was riding on...Bob and Jake turned and looked at me for just a second then focused their attention on the field ahead. Hop on, he said and I jumped up beside where he sat...standing on a bar that ran across the rig. He always let me ride along. Could their be anything better in the world!

I looked at his huge hands holding the thick leather reins...two in each hand...and followed them with my eyes up along the horses to their bits. One hand held the right rein of each horse...one hand held the left. He could turn them by pulling on one hand or the other...though the truth be told...they knew when to turn by themselves and he just more or less encouraged them by saying their names. He didn't ever yell that I can remember...and he never got mad at his two powerful helpers.

It was delightful to ride along beside him as we went up and down the fields...the only noise was the jingle of the harness, the sound of the plow tearing the ground, and an occasional grunt from one of the horses. Seldom did a car come down Fox Street in those days...and when one did...the sound of the rocks and gravel bouncing off it gave it away long before it came into sight. Both Mr. Redpath and I would look up...trying to see if we recognized the car. He usually did...there was really no reason for anyone who didn't live around the area to use the road.

Around noon, Mom came over to the side of the field and called me in for lunch. She asked Mr. Redpath if he'd like a sandwich too...but he said that he was almost finished and would go home for lunch but thank you. I hopped off and told him thanks alot for the ride...he smiled and said he'd see me soon.