Farm living is the life for me.

We are now in this short time period here between Mother's Day and Father's Day, so I'd like to say a few things about my folks. I decided to leave out all of the abusive stuff, like when they kicked, beat and whipped the tar out of me for no apparent reason. No, I was just kidding. There was always an apparent reason.

Have you ever been to Lewis? Lewis, Indiana back in the early 60's, was a thriving metropolis of…I don't know, just guessing, maybe 50 -75 people. Lewis was the site of the big train wreck of 1953, but that is another story. I remember that there was a Post Office inside of a small general store, Mac and Mae Taylor had a gas station, there was a Masonic Lodge/Eastern Star and we also had a couple of churches. There wasn't any school there so I finished out my second grade year down the road at Blackhawk, home of the Blackhawk Chieftains and basketball greats like Bob Morse and Oscar Huntwork.

It was at one of those churches in Lewis where I attended Vacation Bible School, as a young Ol' Simmons. Our teacher was the wonderful Beverly Egnew, who should have probably been granted Sainthood for just putting up with that crew back then. She was a farmer's wife who raised 4 notorious kids of her own, Tim, Tom, Susan and Tarry (Aka Arnie), so she knew something about keeping young whippersnappers in line. I'd like to tell more about this VBS experience, but my memory has failed me terribly at this moment. Maybe some of my VBS classmates are reading this and will offer some recollections of their own from this exciting episode of our lives. I do remember some of the songs we learned back then and even today, I will occasionally find myself belting out a hearty rendition of "Yes, Jesus Loves Me" while in the shower and when I'm truly inspired, I'll just explode into my wondrous sopranic vibrato interpretation of my old favorite, "I've Got the Wonderful Love of My Blessed Redeemer Way Down in the Depths of My Heart".

We moved to Lewis from Terre Haute when I was in the second grade. My Dad, Truman Sims, was a railroader and his job transfer from Spring Hill Tower to Latta Yards created the occasion for this relocation to a magnificent rural setting just outside the city limits of Lewis. After beginning my life as a slick, shyster-like, city boy, young Ol' Simmons finally, at the age of 6, began his apprenticeship as a hard working farm boy. This blind-sided culture shock, at such an impressionable age, may have unearthed a rebellious nature within, which later on in life infected my not so glorious teenage years. To further compound these problems, after my 8th grade year, we moved back to a big city environment, the sprawling urban municipality of Jasonville. This created a kind of reverse culture shock at a time when the shock waves from the first catastrophic event were just beginning to vibrate back to the source. These are the kinds of life altering events from which psychiatrists make huge fortunes. With that in mind, I shall save the hideous story of my High School era for a future chapter.

Our farm consisted of a few acres of soybeans, a few head of Black Angus (appropriately attached to their bodies, of course), a small wooded area (with an abundant supply of squirrel and other nefarious wild game), some pasture that was bisected, somewhat diagonally, by a small creek and lastly, but paramount in our minds, a huge baseball diamond in the front yard.

Our quaint little farmhouse was located in foul territory just off the left field line. Dad made us put up boards to protect the living room windows from sharply hit foul balls just out of play. He constructed a magnificent backstop for us and we laid out the field of our dreams. Right field was bounded by Highway 246 and across this road was Sullivan County. A mighty swing from a pull hitting lefty could easily smack one out of the county (the ball diamond was located in Vigo County). It was on this field that I fine tuned my switch hitting skills and had some of the best times of my life. We had so many great ball games in that yard and if someone could grant me a wish, I would like to go back there to that time and place for just a week and play some more.

The down side to the large ball diamond was our inability to keep the grass from growing. Brother Steve and I could have made a fortune at that age, had we been paid a decent hourly wage for our mowing efforts. Unfortunately, all we got was room and board for a job that never ended. He and I would simultaneously mow with two push mowers and sometimes, it would seem that by the time we were done mowing, it was time to start again. For years I had nightmares of this grass growing up at an astonishingly rapid pace, grass so high that it would engulf me and just reach up and pull me back as I tried to mow it down. This experience surely engraved some horrible, indelible scars on young Ol' Simmons' fragile personality at such an early age. I'm positive that all of this must have been a violation of some child labor law back then, but I guess the statute of limitations has expired by now.

Our backyard was a good sized place to run around in and was bordered by a wooden fence. For some reason, Dad always wanted us to whitewash this fence instead of painting it. Whitewash was a common cheap lime substitute for paint back in those days. It would rub off on you if you just touched it and it required a new coat of whitewash on a very frequent basis. I'm pretty sure when we weren't mowing, we were whitewashing that fence. Just outside of that fence there were some fantastic pine trees and, of course, we had to mow around those infernal, sap-wielding, needle and cone producing behemoths, as well. But they were fun to play around and I even saw my Mom once shoot an opossum out of one of those trees with her trusty, single shot 22 caliber rifle. She was pretty much the Annie Oakley of her day.

To add to our seemingly endless list of chores, Steve and I had to carry water across the soybean field to the cows. We labored across that field with large buckets of water just to satiate the thirst of a few measly cows, time and time again. After a good rain, we would buckle up the rubber boots and try to traverse the muddy path to the trough and often sink in so far (being burdened by the horrendous weight of who knows how many gallons of water in those oversized buckets) that our boots would become stuck in the mire. We would then have to finish the task barefoot and later dig out our boots with a shovel. Well, at least that's the way I remember it now. It was a tough life being an old farm boy, but somehow the young Ol' Simmons survived and lived to tell about it years later. It amazes me today that we ever had any time at all to play any baseball back then.

It was a great time in my life and growing up with Truman and Joan Sims was the best thing that ever happened to me, so a tip of my old bucket hat to Dad and another belated Happy Mother's Day, Mom.

Oh by the way, I failed to mention Mom's salt and pepper shaker collection, which numbered somewhere in the tens of thousands. Guess who got to clean them?