Mules

Mules...“Sure enough, I’ve got two award winning mules” he was telling all he came into contact with that afternoon. His Yankee accent still prevalent after all these years removed from New York; not, as pronounced as the Connecticut influence tongue of his wife and a region removed from that of his Puritan mother-in-law’s “thees and thous.” Solomon Pierce was known as a farmer and community mason. Here at this early Franklin County Fair with his three teen aged boys. And. sure-enough, the judges of the Fair concurred with his assessment and the mules were awarded the predicted status. One hundred and twenty years later, Pierce’s were still farming with mules. Though the two I remember were not award-winning they were contrary and ornery. Running through my uncle’s ancient tent; ripping the tent away from the tent stakes, carrying away from the camp site until it finally slipped off the animals’ back. Not endearing me to my Mamaw, for I’d spend most of the previous afternoon persuading her to allow me to remove it from the washhouse and use it for camping by me and my friends. The beast of burden was critical to my family; moving from eastern Indiana to western Indiana following the Civil War; and numbered among the assets held by the spouse of one of those teenaged boys as she was seeking his civil war pension in the 1890s, and still they’re a part of who we were eighty years later, on the farm serving the family.