A LITTLE BOY, AN APPLE TREE & A HORSE - 02/26/01 01:12 AM
This was a rented house, and the 2 older boys, myself and my brother Jim, also helped out the farmer, haying, feeding the horses [there were 5 of them] and cleaning the barns.
He had another farm he worked as well to support his dairy herd.
The horses were kept at the farm where we lived, and, in the middle of this barnyard, was an apple tree.
there are 6 kids in my family at this time, and it included a younger brother, Randy.
Randy was only 5 or 6 then, and everything he saw Jim and I do, he wanted to do.
Jim and I would climb up the tree i the barnyard and pick apples and eat them.
We always brought some for the younger kids as they weren't to go in to the barnyard.
One day, when Jim and I had to work the fields at the other farm, Randy decided to climb the tree in the barnyard, thinking he could do it without anyone being the wiser.
Mom was on the phone with a neighbor so she cpouldn't see what was going on.
All of a sudden, she heard a blood curdling scream, and recognized it was Randy.
Thinking he had wandered into the barnyatd and gotten stepped on, she dropped the phone and ran outside to find out the matter.
She looked all around, but couldn't see him.
It was then she noticed the 5 horses gathered under the apple tree.
Looking closer, she saw Randy in the tree, trying to get down.
Mr. Hanson [ the owner] had a horse in the yard named Dolly.
Dolly was a work horse [ they call them Clydesdales now], and she was standing under Randy, and every time he would try to climb down, Dolly would put her nose up into his backside and push him back up into the tree.
When mom finally stopped laughing enough to help, she told him to shake down enough apples to keep the horses busy and he could escape.
You know, he never did go into that barnyard again.
True story.