Chris' Christian Blog

The old, black wheelbarrow

"The old, black wheelbarrow" 

January 7, 2017 Blogging Circle of Friends Blog Prompt "Black Wheelbarrow".

It's odd how some blog prompts can send one tripping down Memory Lane. This one certainly does that for me. I grew up on a 198 acre farm in a little town on the Ohio River in West Virginia. Living on a farm was often a lot of work, especially when you had animals on the farm and mouths to fill. So we used a variety of tools to get our work done. We were a big family. My parents had nine children of, which I am the oldest. Therefore we used any and everything we could to make life easier to live. We had a variety of animals. We had more chickens than one could count. My parents would order bitty's, which are baby chickens, every year from Ridgeway Hatchery in Ohio. I remember every spring my dad would come in carrying a box and the box would be sounding off as one hundred chicks wanted free of their confinement. Then we'd have to keep them under a special heat lamp and use special equipment to feed and water them, which was often my job.

We had many other animals as well. We had more dogs than you could shake a stick at, usually strays or dogs that had been dumped. We always had at least one cat, several hogs, horses, geese, ducks, guineas, and sometimes even cattle. Then of course we farmed nearly five acres as gardens with a variety of crops, mostly corn and potatoes. So it was necessary to have equipment around to carry out our work. One piece of equipment we had was a beat up, old, black wheelbarrow. I can still see that wheelbarrow as clearly as if I were using it right now. It was a dilapidated old cuss but it got the job done. We knew that if it ever wore completely out, our dad would either build new parts out of lumber or weld them onto it. He wasn't a professional welder but he had a welder he knew how to use enough to get by. So we were sure that old black wheelbarrow would be around until he was gone.

I remember many times loading that wheelbarrow up with enough weight to give a body builder a hernia and taking off with it. If I was able to get it into the air, I learned how to balance it so that it carried most of the load. My brothers and I worked very hard because we had to. It was a matter of survival for a huge farm family. So weight that would kill many grown men was not unusual for us to carry when we were children. That old, black wheelbarrow became a Godsend to us in very short order.

I also remember the fun we had with that old contraption. We would haul one another around it for miles. We actually had more fun with it than we did any of the toys we had received, with the exception of our bicycles. Our parents were dirt poor but I can honestly say they never once let us do without anything. If they didn't have it, they would beg, borrow, or possibly even steal to get it. (I never knew them to steal.) So when we took to riding around in that old, black wheelbarrow my parents thought it was hilarious. They said we were like a bunch of kittens. If you bought us expensive toys we'd ignore them but roll up a ball of aluminum foil and give it to us, we'd play for hours.

The thing I remember best about that old wheelbarrow is that we overworked the poor thing. It blew a tire in the third turn of the Hillbilly 500 in lap 90 one year. We thought we may have to take it out and put it down because we could not find a replacement tire anywhere. However we were too stubborn to give up. So we simply loaded it and pushed it with a flat tire. When the flat tire was finally cut to ribbons we pushed it on the rim. I remember clearly the deep ruts all over our yard from the rim of that old wheelbarrow. It often looked like a gnome had decided to plow out there!

The old, black wheelbarrow finally met it's fate though. We had it stored in a building that attached to our house. One day in mid-winter we saw smoke coming out of the backside of our house, over what was my bedroom. There was no heater of any kind back there so smoke meant only one thing: the house was on fire! We grabbed what we could get out, mainly all of our guns and the ammunition. We knew the fire department would be there and we didn't want our arsenal exploding on them. At the time we had nearly 10,000 rounds of various ammunition in our gun case, locked down. Once we got it all out and rescued the little ones, we were able to rescue a few other items but had to leave everything else. The fire department was nearly eight miles away and manned only by volunteers. So they arrived 45 minutes or so later and the house was then a total loss. They merely contained the fire and let it burn completely to the ground. The building in which the old wheelbarrow was stored was partially saved but everything in it was lost. So the old, black wheelbarrow is probably now in wheelbarrow heaven cutting ruts in God's gold streets!