The Upper Place PT. 3

The 'War for Civilization,' with many of the same players, took Ed's son Don to places that included the Ardennes Forest. We know it today as the Battle of the Bulge. As Don was off fighting in what seemed like a world apart, his sister, Martha, was employed as a typist for the Army Signal Corps located in Philadelphia while the rest of the family continued to farm the land.

After the official ending of the War, Don spent a period of time in Switzerland recovering physically from the trauma of war. He returned home to his family in the spring of ‘46 after regaining his strength. He had gone to war with the innocence of youth and returned home with the wisdom that only Death can teach. Some of the wounds, though, were not seen. Those were the ones that took the longest to heal, as is often the case. If one were to speak frankly, it is hard to know if the wounds ever really healed completely from the scenes that unfolded before his eyes.  

When Don finally returned home, the family continued to farm at both the farm outside of Callensburg and also the Upper Place. The weather had been promising at the start, and potatoes had been planted up on the hill behind the barn. The promising start of spring suddenly turned into a wet May, causing the whole crop to rot in the ground. An uncertain business. The summer was not much better. The crows decimated the corn crop, eating the soft corn kernels from the bottom of the stalks. Due to this, Ed was forced to replant the field. The result was that a lot of crows were killed that summer.

One evening, as the family was sitting down for dinner, Don saw a crow land in the pasture up behind the chicken coop backside of the house. Just being out of the Army, and with a trigger finger reflex for profanity, Don exclaimed, ' There's a $@#! crow!' With a cloud of silence descending on the room, he disappeared from the table, along with the .22 that had been in the corner. With an accuracy known all too well, he got that $@#! crow and fate seemed kind enough to even score for him a little bit.

Before long, it was haying season, and Ed, with his three children, could be found again bailing hay on the Upper Place. One day, Irene drove the family car up to check on he and the kids,. Upon reaching the top of the Upper Place, Irene was not pleased, not pleased at all, to find that with four people, little headway had been made with the haying. With that, she grabbed the tongue of the wagon and hauled the wagon some distance across the top of the hill without the benefit of a tractor. ‘Enough Lollygagging!’ she exclaimed.