One of the first investments I made when I retired from teaching was to buy a metal detector. I have not used it as much as I’ve wanted to however.

It seems golfing, writing blogs, gardening, lawn work, Facebook, Hallmark movies and marketing books have tended to dominate my waking hours.

This weekend I decided it was time to get the twenty year old metal detector out of the closet, replace the batteries and go exploring.

Again I faced the major question that had bugged me from the moment I became a proud owner of the metal detector. Where do I go to search for lost treasures?

My biggest gold mine had been the visitor’s side of the high school football field at Wheaton High School. The spectators liked to line the sidelines rather then sit on the metal bleachers as they viewed the game.

That provided opportunities for change to accidently fall into the grass as fans were pulling car keys out of their pockets. Digging out change to give a begging child or grandchild concession stand money also offered chances for coins to unknowingly fall into the sideline grass.

My metal detector was ‘dinging’ like crazy as I swept it over the sideline grass. I spent an excited hour using my screwdriver to locate the lost coins buried under the thick, green mat. Most of the coins were quarters and that was fine with me as pennies and dimes can be tricky to locate in the tangle of dirt and grass roots.

I would have liked to have searched longer but digging into the grass with a screwdriver tended to make the ground look like midget pocket gophers had been at work. I didn’t want to chance the groundskeeper having a cardiac once he came across my the mini volcano appearing disturbances on his manicured lawn.

So this weekend I quickly nixed the thought of returning to the high school football field. Instead I had another school ground in mind.

Just two miles from the farm I grew up on was a country school. It closed several years before I started first grade so I never experienced the excitement of attending a country school. Nor did I have to walk uphill two miles to the school in the morning and walk two miles uphill on the return trip when school ended for the day! 🙂

I’m sure you’ve heard those horror stories before if you have any elderly relatives worth their salt as story tellers. 🙂

The school house has been gone for years now and the school yard has been turned into a farmer’s field. But the soil may still harbor interesting and exciting relics from the past.

I had received permission from the farmer to explore his field with the metal detector but Saturday as we approached the field we came upon a huge tractor and digger working the ground up and preparing it for seeding.

We had to proceed to plan B which meant we visited the site of our old farm which was now Federal Wetlands.

As I searched the farm grove for treasures I got reminiscing about the importance of the old country school two miles from our farm house. It was a school that I never attended but because of its presence I am here writing this blog.

Let me explain how an old country school led to my existence and how that process would have made a wonderful  Hallmark movie!

You see back in the country school days the teacher in the one room school typically boarded with a farm family near the school. This was true in this case as the John Dimberg farmstead was only several hundred yards from the country school.

John and his wife welcomed the country school teacher into their home each fall as the new school year began.

Now a Hallmark movie must have a dashingly handsome young man in the plot. That would have to be my Dad, Raymond who at the time was in a real family pickle. It seems his three older brothers had left the family farm and began farming elsewhere.

Since Ray was the youngest man in the family he was forced to stay on the family farm with his elderly mother and run the farming business himself.

Ray was a bachelor and finding a suitable partner looked doubtful as he was caring for his mother and keeping very busy running the farm.

Ahh, but things were looking up when the new country school teacher moved into the Dimberg’s farm home. She was single and a real beauty.

But now the question was how to get the two potential lovers together?

Deer hunting season took care of that problem. Since there were very few deer in the area locals who wanted to hunt deer had to travel to northern Minnesota to find good deer hunting habitat.

John Dimberg loved to hunt deer and rough it in deer camp with his beer drinking buddies which took him from the farm for several days.

But there was work to be done on the farm. Cows to be milked, pigs to be slopped, manure to be moved and cattle to be fed and watered just to mention a few of the jobs.

Immediately the Dimbergs thought of bachelor Ray who lived just two miles down the road as a potential recruit to do the farm chores while John was relaxing in the north woods.

Now in a Hallmark movie there would be many scenes as shy Ray and Jane, the school teacher, would become acquainted. Since Jane was a city girl there would be a lot of farming activities to introduce her to.

Ray would introduce her to milking cows by hand. Perhaps Jane would take a break from grading papers and help Ray load the manure spreader and spread the manure on one of the farm fields. Jane would be fascinated as she gathered eggs from the hen house and then be surprised to learn each hen laid only one egg per day.

Soon the sparks were flying as the young couple took in movies at the local theater and took romantic drives on Sunday afternoons viewing the farm crops.

But as in all Hallmark movies fifteen minutes before it’s conclusion tragedy strikes. In this case the tragedy was Jane getting tired of waiting for shy Ray to ‘pop the question’ so she announced that she had accepted a new teaching position 120 miles away.

So Jane left the Dimberg family and moved 120 miles to a new country school leaving a broken hearted Ray with his elderly mother. 🙁

Of course you know the rest of the story. 🙂 Only a year of traveling 120 miles to court his true love Ray got the courage to ask the right question and Jane said, “Yes!”

As a result of that country school courtship I and my three siblings came into the world and we are all very grateful. 🙂

If by chance a Hallmark executive reads this blog and wants to produce a movie I will allow it under only one circumstance. I must be the one who signs off on all the farm activity in the film. I cringe at some of the farming scenes I have watched in the previous films.

For example when an approaching storm is forecast no matter how many workers can be gathered to help it is impossible to harvest the crop in one day in order to beat the approaching storm. 🙁 Crop harvesting takes days to complete in real life.

Or the time the farmers harvested a field of green corn and produced a truck filled with bright golden kernels of ripe grain.

Also those hired men in the back ground need to do more than move straw bales from place to place to look meaningfully busy.

I’d throw in some pitching manure scenes, milking a few cows by hand and stacking hay bales on a bouncing hay rack.

One thing I wouldn’t change however are their many ‘falling snow’ scenes. The blizzard scenes need a little work however.

Those are just thoughts from an old farm boy. 🙂

Until next time.