Everybody has probably heard this one before as a joke... except this little tale is true.

There used to be a dairy up the road from me, they quit dairying many years ago, but at the time these events occured they were still milking. The farmer had two boys and a girl, one of the boys is a little on the slow side, the other one is crazy... and I'm talking mean, dangerous crazy (they'll be more about him in a later post). The daughter is normal as far as I know.

Anyhow, they had pasture on both sides of a fairly good sized creek that runs through here. The old man needed to move his cows because they'd eaten the grass down pretty good. We'd had a pretty bad rain the night before and he was too busy to ride down to the creek and see if the water was too high for the cows to ford it, so he asked WS (the slow one) to take the tractor (nice little Farmall Super A that they still have) down to the creek and see how high the water was.

I'm sure you see were this is going already...

WS was gone a loooong time. The old man was startin' to get worried when a wet and beraggled WS came back to the barn.

"Well, how high's the water son?"

"It's about up to the seat daddy"

True story.

And this one was told to me by one of my high school teachers...

The same feller (the old man) used to hire the local boys to haul hay for him. Everybody hated working for him because he would always drive the truck like a bat out of hell through the field.

These boys (my future teacher was one of 'em) that he hired finally had enough one day when they were picking up in a field that was kinda thin and the bales were a loooooong ways apart. The old man would rev up the truck and just fly between the bales. The boys picking up would just walk along, taking their time.

Finally, the old man got plumb exasperated ('cause he was paying by the hour) and hollered "Cain't you boys trot?"

And trot they did...

right back to their car

As far as I know they never would work for him after that.