When I opened my eyes, the cow looked nearly as surprised as I was. She stared down at me with a look of bovine puzzlement before leaning down to lick my frazzled hair. I escaped the slimy tongue and climbed shakily to my feet, inspecting the red mark on my elbow. The last thing I remembered was climbing up the cabinets and hot water heaters to the cubby I had found, where chickens and cats liked to hide their young. A live wire came out of the wall near where I climbed, feeding power to the electric fence. I had touched it with my arm and the jolt knocked me off my perch and across the aisle.
I sighed in disappointment. I didn’t even get a cool new scar.
Now, almost twenty years after that adventure, my younger sister said something that I would like to repeat here.
“In the last twenty odd years, we’ve had more adventures than most people have in a lifetime. Sometimes I look back and wonder how we got out alive.”
I sometimes wonder that too. Growing up on a farm was an endless series of adventures and we all left more than our fair share of blood and hide behind. With all the hours we spent romping through the woods and fields and playing with animals and machinery, it’s a wonder we didn’t make it out with more scars than we did.
One of my most memorable adventures actually never happened, though if it did, history would be quite a bit different for all of us. I have no idea how the battles of World War Two spilled onto my farm in rural Pennsylvania, but one night it did. I had defended my barn against all comers, from barbarians to aliens, and the German invaders were no different. Bullets snapped and pinged off of the concrete walls as I ducked into a machine gun nest and returned fire. The battle lasted for hours, until charred husks of tanks and planes littered the ground beyond the walls of my farmyard fortress. I was winning too, until the Germans unleashed their secret weapons
The sight sent me bolt upright in my bed, with cold sweat pouring down my face as I grabbed for my non existent weapons. Let me tell you, a mechanized T-Rex with rockets and cannons snaps you out of a dream quicker than just about anything.
Within the Endless Skies 