Life Sketches

Vivid memories were
made working on the farm

Of all the farms I worked on as a boy, the most memorable was the old Borden Farm, which was on the east side of Canadarago Lake outside of Richfield Springs.

By the time I came along, it had recently been sold to Bill and Shirley Weingates. Back then, they were milking about 200 cows on one of the biggest operations in the area. The first job I had was leveling chopped grass as it was being blown into a silo. I foolishly knocked myself out trying to level it as fast as it was coming in, so that when I climbed out of the silo I was so dehydrated that I must have drunk a gallon of water from a spigot in the milk house. I would later clean the barn and when the spreader was full, I mounted a tractor for the first time and gloriously towed it up Rocky’s Road to give nourishment to the land—not without some mishaps that let the manure to hit the fan.

I enjoyed all kinds of jobs, even cleaning calf pens, because at the time, I was kind of standing outside of myself, watching this kid from Brooklyn doing these country boy things. I had recently read Thomas Hardy and at times I was seeing all that I was doing through the great writer’s eyes. I never enjoyed the country more than at that time of very hard work.