Aunt Bette's Farm

I was really lucky. My Aunt Bette, mom's sister, had a farm in Clarksboro NJ. My Uncle Everett worked at the Mobil refinery in the day, and farmed in the early morning and evenings, and all weekend. The best part of all was my cousin Charlie. He was the only cousin I had that was the same age as me and he was a boy and he lived on a farm! That was beyond cool. He was my brother before my brother Carl was born. Together we were Davy Crockett, Zorro,The Lone Ranger and every other cowboy we saw on television. Aunt Bette and Uncle Everett let me stay overnight a lot on weekends.
Uncle Everett was a real cowboy. He had ridden in rodeos and worked at the Cowtown rodeo in Woodstown every Saturday night.The kids on his side of the family called him Uncle Buck.
People worry today about e-coli bacteria. Back then on the farm we were covered in it. Everywhere you went on the farm there was some kind of animal spoor. You learned to steer clear of the cattle when their tails went up, knowing full well a liquid stream of cowshit was about to flow. Horse manure came out dry in little brown segments that reminded me of giant Tootsie Roll pieces. We used cow pies for bases when we played baseball in the field. We never got sick from any of it.
Aunt Bette was kind and gentle and unassuming. Her house was another gathering point of our family clan. Every Christmas all my aunts would head to the farm and make tons of Christmas cookies. They would chatter and tease and bake dozens and dozens of sugar cookies, chocolate chips,peanut butter and oatmeal,gingerbread men and all the other holiday favorites. All the cousins would be outside running through the fields or playing hide and seek in the barns, with that distinctive odor of hay and animal musk and manure. As the cookies piled up the wonderful smells of baking would begin to make their way outdoors,leading to the inevitable cries of "Can we have some,please?"
Aunt Bette was famous for her molasses cookies. They are a family legend as well as her macaroni and cheese. Aunt Bette was food and hospitality. The farm was adventure and family hayrides, massive Thanksgiving dinners and Easter egg hunts in the spring.
The farm was also more woods. Charlie and I were great hunters trekking the forests scouting for Indians. The farm was a pond way off in the farthest field where on a hot summer's day you could cool off after adventures in the woods.
Later, as we got older, my cousin Charlie would try to teach me how to drive. We were ten at the time. By then he was driving tractors and the flatbed truck they used in the fields. It was too cool to have a ten year old cousin who already knew how to drive. I was doing pretty well until I came up to one of the gates. I forgot to hit the clutch or something, and we crashed into the fence, bending the post. I, of course feared for my life cause Uncle Everett was a hard working man, and no hard working man was going to stand for having his fence damaged. Charlie just went to work and straightened everything up so it kinda looked like nothing happened. He took it all with a laugh and assured me no one would ever know. We never told anyone about it for a long time, but I've got a feeling that somehow Uncle Everett always knew.