Farmers in the Dell

I've previously mentioned in this blog how my favorite toy growing up was my Fischer Price farm set.

I played with it so often that it's one of the handful of memories I have of my sister's nouno, our "Uncle" Nick Sarantos - who died just before I turned 4. Every time he'd see me playing with my farm, in his thick Greek accent he'd say, "I theenk you gunna be farrmehr." (I also remember he wore cuffed pants and he shook my hand to say goodbye, magically leaving behind a one-dollar bill in my palm.)

I admit, I've often daydreamed about Kelly and me being gentlemen farmers living in a centuries-old farmhouse surrounded by acre-after-acre of crops nestled in some lush valley in New England or maybe the Amish Country.

It's not too far-fetched: Kelly's grandfather, Edward Huntington, was a successful sugar beet farmer in Utah County for decades. My grandparents' vegetable gardens were legendary. And my parents and Uncle Chris still reap Mother Nature's bounty from plots in their backyards. You could say "farming" is in our blood!

So this season we decided to plant the rather large plot in our backyard made available after we had an area of blacktop on which previous owners had parked RVs removed last summer. After digging a couple of irrigation channels, we were achy, tired and calling into question the wisdom of the whole enterprise.

Who knows, maybe it skips a couple of generations.

That's a lolly-pop in his mouth, he's not smoking!