A to Z "C"

My stories of growing up out here in the country might seem unbelievable,  but some of you might nod your head while remembering your own youth.  Considering the lives of today's children, it must seem to them that I not only grew up in another time, but it must also have been on another planet.

I learened very young, that on a summer evening when it's hot and you can almost drink the moisture out of the air, you can hear the corn grow. And there's a tell-tale rattle to the leaves when a welcome breeze ricochets through and along the rows.There's even a smell to it when the corn "comes to tassle", and the wind-pollination sets the scents adrift.Few things were so awe inspiring as a corn field, and the feeling that I was part of it, I was one with the field, the night, the world. Until I watched Chiller Theater one Saturday night--a local Pgh TV show that hosted a new frightening movie each weekend.  Anyway, they showed a movie called "The Triffids" and it was terrifying to, you know... to a child.  The premise was that there was a massive meteor shower one night, and somehow the meteors affected carnivorous plants and made them grow taller than most men. AND, if that wasn't scary enough, anyone who had raced outside to watch the meteors fall from the sky (nearly everyone had) went blind. Now we had 7 foot tall, man eating plants consuming the people who couldn't see them com ing. Yeah, they could move! Nd in a cruel twist to a girl who loved warm summer nights out watching the stars on top of the hill, Triffids looked exactly like a cornfield moving toward the blind!  Hah! I still can't walk through a corn field. ;-)

The milk cow that stands out in my memory was a brown swiss named Betsy. In the summer, when the barn was empty and the cows were out to pasture until autumn, Betsy would make her way to the yard fence, to the exact same post every day at the same time.  And that was where we milked her.

We had chickens.  The last peep to hatch on the farm (of which I am aware) we named cheeper because, well, you guessed it, made a cheep-cheep-cheep noise. So creative, I know!  Cheeper turned out to be a rooster.  And he was a rooster who needed anger management, or something.  Have you ever been around a nut-job crazy rooster?  Let me tell ya, they can run fast, they do have spurs that will make a person bleed, and it's rather terrifying having them beat their wings against you and peck at whatever they can reach.  So many times I've wondered why in god's name would any geneticist breed teeth into chickens?  Can you say "small velociraptor"?  I digress.  But who wouldn't?  Seriously, moving on now.

And on a late winter day, I can picture the cats, mousers that they were, stretched out on the logs of the barn at the edge of the hayloft--a southern exposure, sunning, absorbing the warm rays of the sun.  

Catching crayfish in the "crick", car-hood sleds, and the smell of clover in bloom...  C is a great memory prompt!

Have any childhood memories that start with a "C"?