Shayronn Liquie:  

Life The problem I had was deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up - and I'm still trying to decide. In the meantime, life made me a Mother by adoption the first time, biologically the second time, and threw in another one to rear for someone else, (just for good measure). I grew up on a farm in North Missouri. My Dad was a diversified farmer. He always had a herd of cattle, sometimes he had hogs, sheep, horses, and turkeys -(by the 10,000's at a time). When I was 15 he tried the commercial sorghum business, mostly because he just wanted to try something different. That was an exciting time. First he built a big sorghum house and had a 90' vat welded together with automatic skimmers on top and gas burners under it (to cook the cane juice down to sorghum (molasses). The lower part of the building held big cooling tanks where the sorghum was then put in buckets, cans, or jars and labeled. He bought a binder, a cane mill press, and built a big silage pit where he hauled the remains of the crushed cane stock made into silage. The cows loved the silage because it was sweet. When the pit was about 3/4 down, Dad would open the pit up and let the cows go in and eat the silage instead of hauling it out to them. By then some of the sugar cane juice had pooled at the bottom and had fermented. Needless to say we had more than contented cows! They would stagger away really happy. My Mother was right in there helping with all my Dad's adventures. She would sometimes cook for the hired hands, or get out in the the hay fields and drive a tractor when necessary. When I was 13 and my Brother went into the service, I became my Father's helper. I remember running a jay hawk and I only knocked my Dad off a hay stack once with the jay hawk. He always laughed and teased me about it (he had a great personality and was loads of fun). I always worked in a bikini swimsuit under my clothes because we would end the day by jumping in the pond and go swimming as we would get pretty dusty working in the hay and we kept a bar of soap at the pond to use to clean up. My Mother was not a swimmer, but Dad loved the water and taught me to love it. When I was very small, Mother and Dad bought a player piano. I had to stand up on the pedals to make it play. Both my parents liked music and sometimes in the evening after "supper", Mother would pla...Expand for more