There are many interesting incidents that involved my father and his “sense of humor”.

Imagine a scene on a summer day when the family farm was receiving its TLC with the family of three sons and a father going out on the field and attending to a group effort of:
• Cultivating the summer fallow
• Picking rocks
• Mowing hay
• And just about any of a thousand possible other never-ending jobs around the family farm
and it starts to rain.

Rain and that black soil in Saskatchewan quickly render movement over the resulting wet mud virtually impossible. Time to take a break and let nature take its course and soon the sun will shine again and work can continue while we retreated to the farmhouse.

My two older brothers and I took to lying on the bed and reading a pocket book. Zane Grey and Luke Short compiled many Westerns that awed the typical prairie boy with stories of cattle rustling, coyotes howling and the good guys winning over the bad. Our imaginative minds were rapt and it took a bit to be awakened to the voice of our father.
You see farmers seemed to need to work every waking moment in order to make the farm successful and so our father could not tolerate idleness in his sons. He felt it was his duty to will his siblings to enjoy working as he termed it.

“Why don’t you boys have a rest and go and clean the barn?”: he penetrated our comfort zone.
Obediently we went and proceeded to systematically begin cleaning the manure with five tine forks and scoop shovel unto the stone boat. My brother Russel was the first to break the silence with “are you guys resting yet?”
Well the joke started to become hilarious as we chuckled and cleaned until we were finished and all of us agreed that we had “rested”.

Seeing that we were becoming idle and enjoying ourselves was our downfall as our father suggested that we now could go and check the fence line and make repairs since this was something we could do while it was still too wet to go to the fields.

This little vignette is for your enjoyment as I was smiling while writing.

Written as a recollection of my youth dated July 12, 2014.