I Remember the Farm by Sam I. Gellens

Its fields and stream and woods as havens from a toxic family and the physical and verbal abuse of my father
The acute awareness of the passage of seasons–long hot days of summer, the crispness of autumn, a child’s excitement getting snowed in, which meant no school the following day, and the brightness of spring and a time of planting…from the early stages of life through a substantial portion of adolescence
My room with its own fireplace, the place where I felt safe and toy soldiers were my friends and the gateway to my love of the study of history
A time of life without illness in a place of dreaming and imagining during a mostly solitary childhood
The rare pleasure of working together with my father designing and building a small coop for my little flock of colorful bantam chickens, the leader of which was a rooster I named FDR
Raising and showing Polled Hereford cattle and actually winning a junior showmanship award in 1962 which included a letter of commendation from the NJ Secretary of Agriculture and a brass commemorative bowl!
135 acres nestled in a corner of NJ steeped in colonial history and the Revolutionary War- “Washington Crossing the Delaware”, battles at Trenton and Princeton
The 38,000 broiler birds my father raised annually and how labor-intensive doing so was
A setting in which I was a very troubled kid with few if any friends beyond my toy soldiers and animals, a fair-to-middling student, always labeled a “gifted underachiever”