Old Farm Photo

As the title of this blog indicates here is the photo of the farm where I grew up that was taken around 1955.  This photo is taken from a different angle than the more recent one in the blog entry before this one so you need to orient yourself.  The road is on the upper part of this photo too and it is running at an angle from the upper left corner towards the middle of the right side (behind those trees.)  The new house my parents built was placed just in front of the old two story house.  After the new home was built they sold the old one and it was moved to a small town nearby.

My dad milked a couple of cows for years and you can see them in the lot south of the small barn.  The cattle in the feedlots really show up on this photo too.   The barn was removed and a new metal shop building was erected in the same place or close to the same place.

The tall silos were built near that small island looking area in the lower center of the photo.  If I am remembering right that is the area where the large gas and diesel barrels were located.  Most farms then and now have gas and diesel barrels that we fill our vehicles from.  Farm tractors, trucks, and pickups take a lot of fuel and farmers can't be driving into town for every fill up so they have to invest in bulk barrels to make it convenient.  Of course that means the fuel bill when they are filled is a big one too.  I still have trouble with filling up my car at a gas station in town at times since I usually fill up here at home.

There was a small grove of trees that was to the left of the house that my sisters and brothers and I played in almost continually when we were kids.  There were a lot of large cottonwood trees plus caltalpa, elm and ash trees.  We would play house out there for hours.  Each of us would have a separate area as our "house" and would have all sorts of empty cans, old pots and sticks for silverware. We even swept our dirt floors with an old  broom or rake. Of course we climbed the trees too - I think we were part monkeys as we did a lot of tree climbing.


My two sisters and I would climb to the top of a few of the younger elm trees that were 25 to 30 feet tall.  We would climb up to the top of  the spindly trunks and branches, each of us in a separate tree.  We would then start swaying back and forth and back and forth bending the tops over.  Looking back, I am surprised we didn't break the tops out and come tumbling down.  I don't remember my brothers climbing those trees while I was doing it because they were younger than the three of us girls, in fact Don was a baby during the height of this fun activity.

We had a snow storm blow through here Sunday night and Monday and ended up with 6 to 8" of snow.  Yesterday, Monday, the snow looked so pretty as it had come down and settled over everything without any wind.  That was short lived though as the wind picked up my mid-morning and blew it into small drifts around the yard.  John waited until closer to evening to start clearing the driveway our with the tractor and scooping the deck off.  Would hate to do it all and have it all sift back in.  All I can do is watch from the windows this winter.

Besides the snow we are having frigid temperatures here in Nebraska and even colder wind chill temperatures.  I am not sure how they figure wind chill temperatures but they take the actual temperature, factor in the wind speed and come up with a temperature they say it feels like outside.  This morning it was -3 degrees F actual temperature and the high was 10 degrees F around 4:00 pm. but I don't know what the wind chill temperatures were today but tomorrow the high is supposed to be 9 degrees F and a wind chill of -26 degrees F.  It is predicted to be very cold all week....another reason for me to stay in the house.

Until Later,
Lynn