LIFE ON COVERT CREEK by Mona Kennedy.
A girl’s point of view of growing up on an Osborne County, Kansas farm is the setting for Mona Winder Kennedy’s autobiographical story. Taking place between the years of 1942 and 1954, her descriptive recollections bring life to everything from serious events - surviving floods and war on the home front - to very ordinary daily events.
“I was 10 or 11 years old the first time Dad put me on the Ford 8N tractor and sent me to the field to plow. Our line of farm equipment was small since the tractor was small. We had a two-bottom plow, a two-row planter/lister, a Farmhand hay stacker, a hay buck, and a mower. The field he sent me to was a small one close to the house. He took me out there, showed me how to start, how to stop, how to raise and lower the plow, how to turn a corner, rode with me a couple of rounds, and then he went to the house and left me there to plow. After a half hour or so, I was tired of going round and round the same direction, sooooo . . . at the next corner I turned around and went the other direction. Needless to say, that is one mistake that cannot be hidden. Dad had been watching, because here he came, not mad, but with a little grin on his face, asking “what are you doing?” I told him I got tired going the same way and decided to go the other way round. Stopping the tractor, he got me down and showed me why I couldn’t just change direction when I felt like it. There was a v-shaped furrow all the way around the field. Now I know there is a right way to plow and a wrong way to plow.”
|