The Back Home Tour (BxB)

THAT One Summer | Years Ago: Hyde

It was the summer between middle and high school. A long-time friend of Dallas's father, Ben Major, invited Dallas out to his farm each summer for a week. It was usually all hands on deck, so my friend's extra help was much needed. That particular summer he asked me if I wanted to go with him. He explained that they only pay twenty bucks a day, but after getting work done during the day we would be free to have some fun. I did not care if there was money involved or not, a week with Dallas out of the city was payment enough.

By this time, he and I had already been spending the majority of our free time together. When we were in school, we only had one class together, but we would hang out at the end of the day. Now that school was out for the summer, we would spend the night at each other's house almost every other night.

The morning we arrived at Major Acres was the first official time I had ever stepped foot on a real, working farm. Being from the city, my family never had much reason to leave it, and when we did, it wasn't to head out into the middle of the state to visit friends on a farm.

The place was huge. Major had his hand in many of the quintessential businesses that come with land, from crops to livestock. He was a big supplier of soybeans, beef, and corn. The ranch owner also had a great collection of four-legged furballs. Their pens surrounded a huge henhouse full of clucking chickens. Though I thought it was fun to watch the pigs run around and play in the mud together and the goats climb the side of their shed, it was the half-dozen alpacas that made me smile the most.

By that first evening, Dallas had shown me around and demonstrated many of the basic upkeep jobs. He already knew how to do many things like chicken feeding, horse brushing, and cow milking. This was all a surprise to me. I had no idea that Dallas had a secret cowboy side to him. Unraveling this mystery made me feel closer to him almost as though he was letting me in on a secret that no one else knew.

The second morning I was in the middle of pouring slop into the troughs for the pigs when Dallas came to get me. He said that Major wanted the two of us to help one of his farmhands fix up a fence in the eastern pasture. I finished dumping the rest of the pig food and followed him to a pickup truck loaded down with long wooden rails that were waiting for us. We hopped in the bed, sat with our backs against the cab, and Ted the driver took off down the gravel road back toward the entrance to the farm.

When Ted cut off the road onto the bumpy grassland, the shaking and bouncing made me fall against Dallas. He turned and smiled then gave a playful shove with his shoulder. I returned a push, and we went back and forth like this a few more times until Dallas stopped and tousled my hair. Then he casually draped his arm over my shoulders.

"What do you think?" he asked, wanting to know how I was enjoying my farming experience.

"I love it. I mean it is hard work, but the farm is awesome," I reply, turning to him.

Our faces are only a few inches apart.

"Right! This is one of my favorite places on earth. It makes me want to get a farm one day–few cows, some horses. Maybe not rely on it for a living like Major, but have a place that is mine away from the hustle and bustle of the city."

This made me smile. The dreamy look in his eyes was so genuine it warmed my heart. He looked off across the land and started humming the tune of a popular country song about the farmer's daughter.

"Are you still songwriting?" I questioned.

"Yeah, here and there. No quality lyrics have really come to me over the past few weeks, but this place always seems to bring them out of me," Dallas explained. "What about you, mister? How is your portfolio for freshmen English going?"