Pat Finally Makes it to the Harrison Farm

In the nearly fifteen months that we'ved lived in Texas, Corrie has made the trip to her family's farm many times. I haven't been able to make it because of my work situation.

Corrie's grandma, Grandma June, the nice lady we cooked for in the past (I posted about it) grew up on the farm. She is the oldest of her siblings, and being so, was deeded the property. Her son, Corrie's dad, spent most summers of his youth on the farm working, and even enrolled in the nearby town's community college during the early years of America's greater concept of the Vietnam Conflict.

As the title of this post suggests, I finally made it out ot the Harrison Farm (Harrison is Grandma June's maiden name--when going to a market in town, mentioning "we're up at the Harrison Farm" stil means something to the older folks), and there was work to be done. On a farm, work never ends.

This is the building that needed the work: the milk barn.



There were originally milking cattle on the farm, but the main crop was cotton. The Texas panhandle region, in which the farm exists, is very big in cotton. We arrived after in the middle of the night, around 4:30 in the morning, after leaving around 10 at night, after I left work. The trip takes about seven hours, but that late, there are plenty of places to, um, travel a hair faster than legally allowed. It was quite cold when we got there, and here, in the corner of the picture, you can see our air mattress, inside the milk barn. (We moved into the farm house the next night.)



The work that needed to be done was to coat the roof in a new polymer paint. That meant climbing up there, checking the nails, pulling the bad ones, replacing them with heavy duty screws, then spraying the entirety with primer, and then spraying it again with paint. We had a cool new industrial paint spray gun to work with. Peter, one of my brothers-in-law, and Ron, my father-in-law, and I had a good time, even if it felt perilously cramped and dangerous. Corrie and her sister Stephanie even joined in the fun up on the roof. Here's a picture of Peter and me.


I traveled into town on a trash dumping and necessity gathering trip, and, remembering how much fun we almost had flying a kite, I made it a mission to purchase one. It sure was windy enough. I found one and dropped the $3.57 it cost immediately. Later, after I had some problems with the string, somebody asked if I felt bad about wasting the money on it, to which I said that it had been the best $3.57 I had ever spent. Here I am with it soaring really high. Really high.


Peter brought his young son, Colton, to the farm this trip, and here I am holding him, Uncle Pat sharing his sunglasses with the lad. This trip might have been the first time I really felt like I might want one soon.


The area that could be considered a "front yard", a fenced in area by the main door, has a few plum trees, and here, on the ground, you can see the pits from uneaten, even undisturbed, fallen plums from the last season. I think the picture is cool.


It makes me wish I could have been there more often.