Mud and scary dogs: Troubles on the farm

By Scott Cernek
HARVEST HILLS CHURCH
What a muddy mess it is out there on the farm these days. Usually we deal with this kind of muck and mire in late February and early March, but this year we are dealing with it here in January.
Last Saturday, in fact, when the sun finally made an appearance after a week of clouds, the mercury jumped all the way to over 50 de-grees Fahrenheit. The beautiful warm air made it feel like April instead of January for a few hours. Hopefully the tulips won’t start growing before it freezes again.
The temps we are experiencing are nice in that the harshness of winter becomes a little less fierce and the winter itself becomes shorter each day, but the mud sometimes makes for trouble on the farm.
When one is moving cattle, haul-ing manure or doing some other chores on the farm, it’s quite easy to be deceived by the look of the ground and end up burying a tractor or truck up to the axles in the mud.
I remember once when I was a kid literally getting stuck in the mud up to my knees in the early spring. This is how it happened. We had these neighbors down at the end of the drive close to the main road who had two big fierce noisy German Shepherd dogs, which they kept in an outdoor kennel.
Whenever we ventured out to play we hoped these dogs would stay asleep in their dog houses. One day as I was playing in the driveway I got a little too close to the neighbors and these dogs woke up and started roaring like lions and jumping on the kennel fence.
Needless to say I took off into the field to get away from them and ended up in some very thick mud. I was only about four years old at the time and the harder and faster I tried to run the deeper each footstep sank in the mud.
Before long I was stuck fast and unable to move at all. The dogs sensed my dilemma and soon they were

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