Many of you have heard me reference the fact that I grew up on an acreage in Iowa. Here are a few relevant stats:
- Animals (while I was growing up): hogs, chickens, cats, horses, and dogs
- Road surface: gravel (one mile to a paved road)
- Nearest neighbor: one mile
- Sides of the property surrounded by corn fields: 4
- Nearest town: Columbus Junction, 9 miles away
More pictures after the jump…
Photos by: Shaun Stoller a.k.a. The Bro
We were a cattle family, so the house was surrounded by pastures, and the crops were further away from the house. :)
I assume that the metal fixture in the top image was used for the same thing we used ours for: An old rusty small grain bin transformed into a trash burner. The fires I fed in the 80s and 90s with plastics, papers, and wood.
mmmm…beautiful.
I betcha you made some friends with mice and snakes didn’t you?
:-)
Sheep and cattle for us. Our livestock acreage was about 20 miles or so from home…Thank goodness.
Michael – yep, that is the “burning bin.” My parents collect recyclables and take them into town for recycling, but when I was kid, any garbage that could be burned was tossed into the raging fires of the bin.
brownfemipower – :-) I made lots of animal friends…rabbits, possums, snakes et al.
James – The smell emanating from 100 hogs is quite pungent. I always kept my chore clothes in our unfinished basement along with my boots. Oh the memories of going out to water the hogs in 20 below wind chills…. a lot of people would never guess that I have these experiences given my current techie expertise…I like to talk about bailing hay with my advisees. I tell them that they have it easy in Oregon because it’s not 100 degrees and 100% humid in the summer ;-)
I’m another displaced “Iowegian” as my Minnesota cousins called us. Those pictures take me back. We also burned our trash (in an old 55 gal. oil drum) and raised hogs–cleaning the hoghouse every summer, walking the beans and, when I got older, detasseling corn for Pioneer seed corn for some extra money was my summer work.
(I’m a literature professor and I always take pride in explaining that at one point I had the 15th best carcass in the county…i.e., my prize 4H hog did.)
We plan to head back home this week for my parents’ 50th (north central Iowa, on the farm, 1.5 miles to pavement, 4 miles to the nearest town), if we can get there…we were planning on staying at my brother in law’s north of Iowa City, but that’s not looking so likely right now…
There’s nothing quite like an Iowa view. Â I’m sojourning in ohio for a bit, and I can’t get used to all these trees. Â They’re pretty and all, but I miss the horizon. Â Thanks for the pics.