It was the only time that we had rented a camcorder - a video camera that preserved our memories on film, a VCR tape, to be shared and viewed.  Mom rented it for twenty-four hours from the Ben Franklin store in town.  We used it for the visit by our relatives from Czechoslovakia, but Mom, with a large family and poor farming economics, always looking to get her money’s worth, suggested that since the camcorder wasn’t due back until noon, why not take it and walk around the farm.

Taking off from chores a little early, I took the camcorder in hand and did a walking tour of the farm.  I started with the wooden granary next to the barn, complete with the Farmall H and auger that stood at the ready for harvest later that day.  Then walking through the barn, I captured Jaime as he milked cows, and the look of the pasture and feedlot on a bright August morning.  Walking to the machine shed, I carefully showed each piece of machinery, then on to the garden, the shop, and the a quick look at “Machinery Hill” - the retiring place for all of our farms old equipment and parked “parts” repository.  Then back to the house.

The entire tour took less then twenty minutes.  But my brothers all laughed and told me I was nuts.  For not only did I video tape our farm, I provided running commentary - the grain would be dumped into the pit at the base of the elevator, the PTO of the Farmall H would drive the auger and bring it to the top of the bin.  The Farmall H was restored by my brother John.  The cows were milked twice a day, the pipeline was installed only a couple of years ago.  Prior to that was the bucket milkers.  The siding on the barn was two different sizes because it was build during World War II and they couldn’t get anymore twelve inch siding.

For all twenty minutes, you could hear me commenting and telling stories about our farm - this place that we lived and worked every day for most of our lives.

“What are you?  Stupid?  Everyone is gonna know this stuff anyway.” Brother John chided.

I will admit I panicked a bit, wondering how I could erase the commentary off  the tape, how could I separate the words from the pictures so that generations of my family wouldn’t be commenting on that addled brained youngster who ruined a perfectly pretty picture of the farm with his incessant talking.

But it was too late.

Copies were made and sent out to relatives from Minnesota to Pennsylvania.  It took years for history to judge.  When visiting relatives that had gotten the tapes years before, I made a comment about the commentary on the video.

“Oh, the commentary was the best part.  How else were we to know what you were talking about!”

As the farm has evolved and changed - the combine, the swather, the plow, the auger, the barn, the shop, the pasture and the feedlot are all gone.  The wooden grainery converted to a garage.  Only the garden, the machine shed, the house, and the windmill remain more or less unchanged.  The face of our farm, the face of our family has changed.  The farm where we lived and work is now a homestead with no cattle and no equipment for almost as long now as when we worked it.

The video, and the commentary stand as a picture of our farm, our working farm, and will speak to my children and my grandchildren of the life that their family lived.  It will explain the equipment, the buildings, the stories of their ancestors.  It will serve as a link to the past, that helped to form them via their ancestors.

Maybe I wasn’t so stupid after all.