The Narrative's End

So much for my nostalgia and dreams of long ago. I often think of the "Walnut Hollow" where we always, in the fall, would gather the nuts and hull them trying to keep our hands from getting stained. In later years we rented that land and put a barbed wire fence around it in order to pasture the cows there. On the level part of that property Mike plowed and planted corn. This was done the old, slow, hard way with horses. After plowing, the soil was leveled with a harrow both ways, after which it was rolled and then marked both ways so that the crop could later be cultivated both ways. After that, Joe and I would get a day off from school to do the actual planting. We dropped either three or four kernels of corn at each intersection of the marker and later covered these "hills" with a hoe by hand. Later, when the corn was big enough, it was cultivated both ways twice to each row. In the fall it was the same slow, laborious job to harvest the crop. At one time I estimated that it took us at least

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The manuscript ends here.
--Mimi