A number of Mother's relatives lived on farms in Nebraska. Several family reunions were held at her Uncle John Winslow's farm near Fremont. Meals were lavish. During corn harvest time, a dozen or more farmers would work together, bringing their teams and wagons, spending three or four days at each big farm. All of their wives would gather at the same farm, helping the hostess, each being famous for some gastonomic specialty.

One funny episode I remember at a reunion occurred when a little cousin from a big city wandered out in the back yard when Uncle John was killing chickens for dinner. The boy ran into the house yelling "Mommy! That man is winding the chickens' faces right off!"

When I was sixteen, I spent part of a summer at a couple of cousins' Nebraska farms. One was a cattle range in the western "sand hills". It was real dry desert, freezing at night and burning by day. Being a city boy among the cowboys, I was fairly useless while they were driving the teams to cut and rake hay; but I did have a job driving the stacker horse. While one man stood on the haystack to build it up, a driver of the horses would rake a load of hay onto the wooden teeth of a giant fork which was at the end of a long lever. The other end was pivoted and harnessed to a horse that could pull the load upright over the haystack. The problem was that the horse would have to move fast enough to throw the hay onto the stack, so the man could arrange it properly. So my job was to hit the ground hard with a long cane pole and scare the poor horse into jumping forward to throw the hay, usually on top of the man stacking the hay. His job was somewhat risky, because sometimes the load would include an unhappy rattlesnake!

I felt inferior among the hands, but got a little respect one evening when we were sitting around the windmill waiting for the supper bell. One by one, the boys showed how strong they were by chinning themselves as many times as they could. Their best score was ten, and mine was twenty.

My cousin, the young ranch owner, had just married a pretty school teacher, and I was there when the unfortunate young lady cooked her first meal for the rowdy cowhands. They pulled suck uncouth tricks as passing the butter so that the next man would stick his thumb in it; but the worst came when she brought out the dessert -- rice pudding with raisins. None of them would eat it. When she asked what was wrong, they all said it was full of flies! The poor girl went into the bedroom and cried. I guess that was their idea of an initiation.

The ranch had a pond out in the pasture. One day, I dug some worms and went fishing. I had caught several small perch and had thrown them on the bank behind me. I noticed that the count didn't add up as fast as I'd expected. Suddenly I caught some motion out of the corner of my eye. When I turned around, a snake was carrying one of the fish away!

By coincidence, the same day I was writing this, I happened to read (December '92) in the new Farmer's Almanac, a list of ten counties in the U.S. having the lowest populations. About five of these are in the sand hills of Nebraska!

By another coincidence, we received a Christmas card today from my cousin Katherine Lee (formerly Fauquet) saying that Bonnie, the young rancher's wife, has recently passed away.

The other Nebraska adventure that I recall was participating in a small cattle drive, when cousin Paul and the cowboys drove a herd of cattle to a small town, down the main street, steering a few strays out of back yards, to the stock corral at the freight station. I could barely stay on a horse, and was afraid of falling off and disgracing myself!