I was in the Gallia County Farmhouse. I had four large pieces of hardboard—about a meter by a meter and a half in size—which I had cut out to make collages on. On one of the pieces I had written the name of my first cousin, "Jimmy Halley." My grandmother Mabel was there and asked me why I had written that. I said, "Well that piece represents how much land Jimmy Halley had up here if you wanted to give it to him. But you could give it to him anywhere you wanted to on the Farm."
Apparently, Jimmy had the right to that much land—the size of the piece of hardboard—somewhere on the Farm whenever my grandparents wanted to give it to him.
My step-grandfather Clarence and I walked down to the garden in back of the house. Clarence and Mabel had planted rows of corn there and I spoke about planting some wheat, which I thought was a type of plant which grew under the ground. Clarence told me that a person could make a lot of money planting wheat, even if it was just one long row down the middle of the field.
I asked him how much he was paying for wheat every year. He told me he was paying $12,000 a year for wheat. I began thinking I could plant wheat and make enough money to live on for a year. I told him I was going to plant wheat and that seemed to make him happy.
I also had a bunch of bananas with me which I had bought. He began showing me some rows of white flowers in the garden. The petals of the flowers were very dense—like a carnation—and very wide. Clarence told me we could break off the two ends of each banana and plant them between the rows under the petals of the flowers. He said that banana trees would then grow.
We began breaking off the ends of the bananas (each piece was about two or three centimeters long) and planting them one after the other under the flowers. He said we could eat the middle part of the bananas, but I did not know what I had done with my middle parts. I took a bite of one of his bananas and it did indeed taste good.
We continued until we had planted probably 100 banana ends. I told Clarence I did not even know bananas could grow here. He said something like, "Yea, you could take an end like that and throw it down on the ground somewhere and a big banana tree would grow and that would be able to show you that that was a good place to grow bananas."
Finally, we finished. Clarence then began telling me something about the history of the Farm.
Suddenly I looked up toward the Farmhouse and saw a large, brownish-black bear lumbering down the hill toward us. It was about half-way down the hill on the right side of the House as I looked up the hill. I said, "Bear!"
Clarence looked and likewise saw the bear. The bear was probably twice as big as me. I was surprised to see a bear there since I did not think any bears were around there, although it vaguely seemed to me that Clarence had told me he had once seen a bear near here. I wanted to holler up to my grandmother to stay in the house. We had to do something immediately.
We walked into a small shed. I pointed to an old corn bin in the shed and said, "Let's get into it."
The shed itself had a door which was closed and the bin inside the shed also had a door. Over top the door to the shed was an open space the bear might be able to crawl through and the door to the bin did not have a lock on it. We would just have to hold the door shut if the bear tried to get in. We would not be very safe because if the bear managed to get inside the bin we would be trapped in there. I saw no place else to go; so we both jumped into the corn bin.
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