Here we are in mid week of the last week of January

 TERRY

As I write Terry is reading the paper in bed.  She had two nice therapy sessions yesterday.  I was thankful that her injured left foot was not an issue.  She will again have therapy tomorrow.  As I say often it is one day at a time and we are hopeful that good health will come soon.

I have 10:30 tennis today with some of the better players so am looking forward to that.  We, once again, have warm weather as it is supposed to be 80 today so tennis will again be kind of a sweat bath.

Not much today except some memories!

    THE BARN

Aside from the house, the barn was IT.  So much went on there, so much work and so much play.  This picture does NO justice to it as this was taken WAY after the barn was used for cattle.  So here are some things that stick in the memory from the time I was growing up:

• Where you see the gas tank was where we parked the hay rack and pitched hay or bales into the barn.  Right in the center of the upper wall there is a door.  We spent many many hours pitching hay into the north end of the barn but that was before we started having the hay stacks moved by the stack mover!  Also on the far corner of the north wall was where the gate to the barn yard was.  It was there that we would open the gate and haul hay into the barn yard and throw it over the side of the hay rack.  When I was very young there was a water tank there but by the time I remember working the water tank had been moved to inside the barn.  I should add that after we started having entire hay stacks moved out hay room was not used so much so that was when Dave and I put up a 5 gallon can 10 feet up on the wall and it was there I honed my basketball shooting skills with a rubberize tennis ball!  It probably speaks volumes about my lack of dribbling skill!
• The row of windows to the right were in the calf pens that lined the east side of the barn.  There were four large pens with the very end one having a cement floor.  On the dirt floors we tried to keep fresh straw on the floors to cover the dirt.  It was in those pens that we would keep the young calves when it was time to have the stop taking milk from their mothers.  For several days we heard COW MUSIC coming from the barn!!!
• On the far side, west, that one can not see, was another row of windows that were in the wall behind were we milked the cows.  I remember it was difficult to keep ALL windows in place as it seemed that there was always one or two broken panes.  
• In the very SE corner was a cemented pen where the water tank sat at the front.  That was where Dave and I got ourselves into way too much trouble as we would turn the water on to fill the tank and then go play only to forget the water!  If I had 5 cents for every shovel of water I scooped out of that pen I would be rich!
• In kind of the middle of the barn between where we milked cows and the hay barn wall was a small pen where we often kept a calf that needed special care.  That is where I would often take the calf out of the barn and make a little fence for it outside.  I always felt sorry when they had to stay in the barn!
• The beams above the pens was where Dave and I would often play tag !  Yikes, as that was about 8 feet in the air and one had better have good balance.  Once I fell kind of head first into the pen where there was a padding of pretty awful stuff and it was not so good!
• It was also on the beams above the pens that we would, in the winter, shoot birds as they settled in for a warm winter night.  Don't ask me what happened to the shots that missed!
• When we cleaned the pens, which was not often enough, we would remove the window in the pen and throw out the manure through the window into the manure spreader parked under the window.
• Dave shared with me a couple of years ago that when they moved to Iowa he stored several items in the barn including a new radial arm saw that never saw the light outside the box.  It all burned in the fire that destroyed the farm.  
• It was on the far side, south, of the barn that I would use the scrapper on the back of the Ford tractor to smooth out the barn yard in the summer when the cows were in the pasture most of the time.  It was there that I became a baseball hero and World Series Champ as I threw the ball against the side of the barn and then would field it with such skill that I always won!!!
• I could also write about the day, each year, that we dehorned the young calves in the barn yard.  I could describe the squirting blood etc but will skip it for now!

So to wrap up "THE BARN" it goes to saying that the barn was a place of work, play and it certainly was pretty much the center of life on the farm except for our home of course.

I got a laugh out of this as it is so so true!  I am guessing during an afternoon on the Ford or the M tractor I I may have gone through that song MANY times!  AND it seemed with each time through I tried to make it louder!  Pretty funny I would say.

Here is the Schwinn Bantam bike that was used by John, Travis, Aaron and Cynthia as they learned how to ride bike.  NO training wheels for the Lees!  As the snow melted in the spring of 1975 in Devils lake I drove to downtown Devils Lake to Johnson's Hardware Hank.  There, in the window, was this shiny new bike just waiting for US!  There is a bar to put on so it can be a girls bike or boys bike.  The first time it was used we loaded it up in our fancy 4 door hardtop Impala and drove to the School for the Deaf.  There we ventured out to the football field which had a quarter mile track around it.  It did not take John very long to get the hang of riding and off he went around the track on his own.  It was the first of many many days of working with the 4 kids as they ventured into riding two wheelers.  In 1977, the year we moved to St. Paul, it was one of the first things that went into the truck!  

Today, Aaron has it and has cleaned it up and has it looking nice.  It reminded in the attic of our garage on Niles Ave for MANY years.  I just wonder when and who will ride it next!!!

So here it is almost 8:30 and time to sign off for today.  I still have some FP left to sip and enjoy but that too shall be gone soon.  Then it is on to my continued journey of cleaning up papers.  And oh yes, tennis in two hours.

Hard to believe that this was 73 years ago today!!!  Just like now, I should lose some weight!!!  Mom was always super at having cakes.