SOD BUSTER!
“IN THE END, IT’S NOT THE YEARS
IN YOUR LIFE THAT COUNT.
IT’S THE LIFE IN
YOUR YEARS.”
Abraham Lincoln
As time goes on, and you young ones will know what I mean sooner than you think, we start losing friends. Some are close, some are neighbors, some make an impact on your life that you don’t realize until time flows by.
Last week I found out that Chris had died. Chris Henry was a farmer. A farmer from the old school. As a youngster I remember his dad farming with draft horses and an old crawler tractor. Chrissy farmed with the horses and every year cars would stop and watch him cultivate feed and corn. There were news reporters that would shoot pictures because anyone still working the land, even part time, with horses was an event.
In the mornings he would hitch up the old hay rack to the team and go across the river to hook up what ever he was going to be doing that day. It was forever interesting. There was no farmer that knew his land foot by foot like he did. He would give way to the tractor for plowing and harvesting and the boys would have a tractor in the field. But there was never any farmer that was more in tune with his life than Chris.
We used to buy cracked wheat for hot cereal that he ground with an old mill. The folks would trade whole Guernsey cream for cracked corn that made the most wonderful corn bread that was every baked. I was not real fond of it but it was cheap and being so young did not realize how little the folks actually had. It helped the budget a lot.
Chris and his family also had a huge garden and put up a majority of what they ate for the year in jars stored in a cellar. In so many ways he was old fashioned but he did do one thing that was very progressive at the time. He built a huge barn that he fed cattle in, out of the weather. His wife called it Chrisse’s Cow Palace.
Always seen in his farmer overalls he had a jovial nature and when he talked where most would punctuate with a cuss word he would say “sod buster!”
Well Sod Buster died last week in his 90’s. He saw, and held onto, the horse drawn era into todays electronic mega farming world. I wish I could have asked him what he thought of how we are today?
I am sure that he would start out, “Well sod buster!”
