I know it must seem the same for every generation, but I think most of us feel like we grew up in the best times.

I remember how great it was to spend Saturday mornings watching cartoons while Mom was slaving away in the kitchen preparing something for dinner that I’m sure none of us kids truly appreciated. (Probably fried chicken, which was as laborious before it even reached her frying pan, since it was an all-out family effort to raise and butcher chickens.)

As farm kids, it’s hard to tally the number of hours we spent outside. My brothers farmed the house yard with their toy machinery — to the point where paths were blazed where they drove their machinery with their knees and elbows to their many respective fields.

And we all became proficient at “bubbling” our lips to duplicate tractor sounds.

One summer my sisters and I got the hankering to use one of the corn crib bins for a “play house.” Dad said we just needed to finish cleaning it out if we wanted to use it.

We were only in there (what seemed like) a short time before Dad announced he needed the bin to store beans.

Oh, the betrayal of it all. Only a young farm girl could understand that kind of devastation. We worked hard to clean out the bin and “move in,” and we were free and on our own, if only for that brief time that summer. Mom must have loved the peace and quiet.

We played baseball in the farm yard, using disk blades for bases. There were enough of us to have two teams, and today we all have one of those disk blades as mementos.

We played kick-over-the-wire, Annie-Annie Over the House, catch, badminton, red light-green light, hide and seek, and tag — both during the day and after dark. It was the “dark” part

that got my brother in trouble one summer when he miscalculated where the hole was for the

basement addition. It had to have been a long, dark freefall to the bottom of that hole.

What farm kid never sank to their necks in an overhead bin of cool corn on a hot summer day? When a municipal swimming pool was only a dream, it was the next best thing.

As farm families do, they teach their children about the family business early. It jump-starts their future career paths, and it’s fine … most of the time.

Our boys were in little league baseball one summer — something they didn’t do more than a season or two because the lure of the farm was just too much for a couple of farm boys.

Labor availability was low, so they were talked into driving the pickup and water tank a few short gravel road miles to the field.

They received the regulation tutorial and started the trek, following behind the sprayer.

When I got to the game that day my husband said, “The boys had a little trouble today.”

I didn’t brace myself for finding out they had driven, and after they had gotten too close to the side of the road, the water tank twisted off of the pickup hitch and rolled into the ditch.

The pickup remained on the road, with our two boys inside.

There are a thousand stories like this out there in the farming community, if there is one.

But when it’s your own kid, you want to run for an airsick bag, then fall on your knees in thankful prayer that no one was hurt. Or worse.

Then you just want to wring someone’s neck.

I still have that twisted pickup hitch as a reminder that tomorrow is guaranteed to no one, and that guardian angels really do exist.

I’m a little sad that most kids today don’t get to have farm life experiences (minus the pickup one). The farm yard is not only a place to make a living, but a haven for kids to dream, imitate, play, run off energy, imagine, ride and race bikes, love animals, and learn life lessons.

Today’s children will never know the glory of perfecting that “bubbling” of lips and making of horsepower sounds for just the right tractor noise as they farm the back forty on their hands and knees.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford, Iowa. She can be reached at kschwaller@evertek.net