As my short time memory gets shorter, my memories of long ago still hold up pretty good. 

 We had moved from a little town in Pennsylvania to the Sitser Farm near Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, when I was one and this must have been a couple years later. Some of the neighbors had come to our house for a party. They sang and did some dancing moves that they all seemed to know. I was small enough so that they put me in the woodbox that stood at one end of the woodstove. This was to help keep me from getting stomped on. 

 I can even remember some of the words of some of the games they played. "I'll get another one purtier than you, purty as a bluebird, purtier too Skip come a lou my Darlin."

 Then there was another one about kindlin wood "Split it fine and carry it in, Mebbe she'll let you kiss her agin." But there was never very much kissin, probably no one wanted to start any habits.

 We kids thought we were fixed for life there. Anyway, Bob and I did. Although I'm not sure what my brothers knew. Dad had hired with kind of a share cropping deal. He was to get part of the calves as they came along. But Mr. Sitser could see that Dad would soon have a herd of his own. So he changed the rules. He still had Dad and Mom and sometimes the hired man would go along, and bring him butter, cream and milk, eggs and some other produce. At that time there used to be some old fellows that would offer to help with chores for their keep and maybe a little tobacco money. Dad took one on and he used to tell people that he was John Brown's hired man, but Mom called him John's lantern holder. He had a son that must have gone to Mr. Sitser and offered to work for less money for one morning Mom came in and said, "Come on and get up we're moving today."

 They loaded our goods on a couple of bobsleds with hay riggings on and we moved to a farm up in Susquehanna County. I remember it rained so much that summer that though Dad was able to get oats and corn and potatoes planted it was so wet that he couldn't cultivate and didn't finish haying until way late in the summer. Dad said that was the unluckiest move he ever made. 

 When his year was up he hired out as a hired man right on the edge of Tunkhannock. This man bottled the milk from his dairy and peddled it in town. He needed a milk wagon horse and Dad sold him the road horse Bird, the only thing Dad had to show for his work on the place he had just left. 

 That man was known to be so stingy they used to tell a joke in the little country store in Lemon or Lynn two little gathering places near where we lived. This farmer had a son and a horse named Dan. According to the story the farmer said to his son, Howard "Give old Dan 5 more grains of oats, we're going to push him to the limit today." He had built two hen houses in the edge of two little patches of woods which were quite a ways apart. Every afternoon two of us kids would take a pail and go to pick feed out there. Those hens were supposed to scratchin the woods for worms and bugs and berries to live on. He must have had to shut them in and feed them in the winter. 

 When we first moved there his wife told Mom, "There's a bag of brown beans in the attic, help yourself. I never have to cook any pork with them."

 Mom started to look them over and found they were full of weevils. That's how some people lived back then.