Trending
Suffice it to say that I love my job. I get paid to watch sports, write about sports, present sports to you in our paper and make you guys laugh on the weekends with columns about myself and my family.
I write this for you because I realize that should I ever walk away from this position here at 301 Cayuga Ave., there isn't much that I could do.
At least I can tell you of one of the things I could not do and that is work on a horse farm with my wife.
This crossed my mind recently as we found out our daughter, Julianna, is returning her horse to Blair County after having kept it on a farm near Washington, Pa., the past several years. As a traveling X-ray technician who is now working in Utah, Julianna is unable to give her horse the attention she had given it when she was of elementary age when we purchased it for her. My wife is so looking forward to helping take care of Vegas (the horse) during the mare's autumn years in a horse barn in Hollidaysburg.
Back when we first got married, Ann Marie had a horse named Chase that we brought down from her farm in Canoe Creek to a farm near our Lewistown home. When she became pregnant with our first daughter, Maggie, the doctor would not let Ann Marie clean the horse stall because of how big she got (and I got approval from the Mrs. for typing that up for all of you to read), which meant guess-who got to learn how to clean a stall? Up until that point, the only thing I knew how to clean was a litter box for my cat, and my backyard on Third Avenue in Altoona where my dog Bruno once lived during my childhood.
For those of you who do not know this, there is an art to cleaning out a horse stall. First of all, it is frowned upon if you wear a clothespin on your nose to keep the smell of a horse barn from penetrating your nasal passages. Hanging air fresheners from your baseball cap is also a no-no.
From what I remember, you sifted out the manure from the sawdust and the hay, put it into a wheelbarrow and rolled it out back. I personally wanted to throw everything out and refill the stall with new sawdust and new hay, which would have made Jeannie Franco very proud.
That's how she would have done it, but then again, I can't imagine her letting us have a horse out back of our house living in between Uncle Frank and Grandma Franco. Grandpap Franco used to shoot pigeons out of the sky from his backyard so that he could clean them and eat them (that's a completely different column!), and the gunshots probably would have scared the horse.
My Uncle Frank's dog, Brownie, was basically your junkyard dog that was captured so wonderfully in every Bugs Bunny cartoon from my childhood. That dog would never have liked a horse back there. He didn't like humans back there.
But I digress. Back to the horse barn in Lewistown. I used to want to bring my radio to listen to music while I "mucked the stall' which is what my wife called it. But you see, if I am wearing headphones, how can I hear what I am doing wrong from my oh-so-wonderful wife of 29 years? There was a pace that had to be kept to because there were other horses in the barn and those folks might show up to do their own "mucking."
Did I mention the birds yet?
I could not understand why birds were flying into Chase's stall and picking out -- stuff -- from the manure. What could they possibly want from that? According to my wife, the birds pick out the grain from the manure to eat.
They either do it in the stall or out where we dumped the stuff we were cleaning up, but the main focus of this sentence should be … why are birds eating grain that is inside manure? Can't they smell the manure? Can't they taste the manure? It's manure! The Mirror's policy on language keeps me from using any other word, but I think you get the picture?
I was gagging. I could not help it. I was raised soft in the big city of Altoona while my wife grew up on a farm where she took part in the castration of young pigs before sending them off to market.
The smell of mucking a stall, and the sights of mucking a stall, were tough on this guy. Sure, she was about to give birth for the first time, but I had it rough, too.
Both of my sons worked at a horse barn in the Loop area of Hollidaysburg in high school and never were bothered by these things. I wasn't so lucky.
In 1998, when Ann Marie was pregnant with Julianna, and Maggie was 3, I don't remember much about mucking a stall then. I think my wife found it more beneficial to teach 3-year-old Maggie how to do it, or at least lie to me and say someone else would do it, instead of bringing me back into the barn.
I guess I should have taken umbrage with that, but it takes a lot to offend me. Nature offends me, what with the birds and the smell of manure. When we drive through nearby Belleville, my wife loves rolling down the windows and smelling what she calls "fresh air." No complaints here. I got a whole column out of it so it's a win-win for all of us.
Mirror Sports Staffer Scott Franco writes a monthly column for the Mirror.