By Josh Feyen

This post originally appeared on Josh’s Substack, here.

When I was a kid, the end of May always signaled the final approach to summer vacation. For town kids, the next three months meant day camps, time with a baby sitter and summer trips. For my brothers and me, those three months meant the start of haying season, rebuilding pasture fencing, gathering firewood and helping mom in the garden. So while “summer vacation” meant no homework, there was lots of work to do.

In early spring mom started her own seeds and later did most of the planting. But we helped with sowing row crops, like sweet corn, or big forgiving seeds that we couldn’t mess up, like squash and beans. As plants grew, she cared for them, but when the vegetables started coming in, we were called back to the garden to pick strawberries, tomatoes and beans, and always thoroughly search the zucchini patch, lest one grew into an inedible monster. On the occasion we missed one, my brothers and I would slice the bloated beast lengthwise to build a boat, scoop out the seeds, and add toothpicks for oars or a chopstick for a mast. We floated the two opposing ships in the cattle water tank, squash seeds surrounding the zucchini ships, evidence of the great sea battle in the barnyard.

But it wasn’t all work. My parents had figured out early in their marriage that camping was a viable means of taking a vacation on a budget; they even honeymooned in a tent. And so each summer we spent three or four days between first and second hay crop, or just after the oats were harvested, to go to a nearby county or state park for a camping trip.

My July 12 birthday marked the middle of the school break. Since my dad and an aunt’s birthdays were the day before mine, and an uncle’s was just a few days earlier, we always celebrated together. I loved those weekends because my aunt and uncle made the 3-hour drive from Milwaukee to celebrate together on our farm.

While we worked with dad and the animals or in the fields, Mom worked in the kitchen, calling for us between canning batches to gather more vegetables. She wasn’t satisfied until she had put away 80 quarts of stewed tomatoes and 40 pints of green beans. The pantry shelves took on a Christmas theme in the middle of August.

While mom gardened to keep the family fed, she also tended low-growing flowers at the feet of her statue of St. Joseph, and a hedge of Russian sage surrounding the vegetable garden. And then there were her favorites. I can still hear mom’s voice saying “my glads,” referring to her collection of gladiolas, towering behind the Russian sage.

Dad made time away from work as well. When we ended a day’s tasks early, or maybe after church, dad would suggest we go fishing. Mom occasionally accompanied us, especially when we’d bring a second canoe to a nearby lake. But when dad had walking along a local trout stream in mind, he was talking to my brothers and me. He always had a tackle box and four poles ready, and he’d send us out to mom’s garden to turn over a couple spades of dirt to collect bait. If we were lucky, she’d have a nearly finished compost pile—those were easy to dig and always yielded the biggest worms.

As summer approached Labor Day, I was farmer-tanned and could throw hay bales across the barn floor that weighed more than I did. By the end of each August I also knew a little more about the inner workings of farm equipment, or had learned to drive a bigger tractor (but never the really big one), or had graduated to using the chain saw without supervision. And after putting away our final crop of hay, my brothers and I summed the daily bale count, and dad paid us one penny each for every bale we made. While it doesn’t sound like much, after putting up 10,000 bales a summer, $100 was a lot of money to a 12-year-old boy.

Labor Day also meant returning to school. Except for the field corn, which dad harvested because it required “the big tractor,” the crops were harvested and stored or sold. Other summer chores, like painting and fencing were done, and mom’s garden had slowed down enough that she didn’t need us to gather the final tomatoes for taco night. My parents also returned to school, mom teaching reading in Seneca, a school district west of ours. Dad drove south to Boscobel, where he taught carpentry and auto mechanics. My brothers and I returned to North Crawford, the largest school district in the state, in terms of area, and one of the smallest student populations. Wauzeaka, not far to the southwest, was even smaller.

I recall all of this because as this year’s Memorial Day came and went, I found myself taking a vacation from writing weekly for Substack. The first missed entry bothered me, even though I had scrounged my imagination and surroundings for inspiration. But there were garden beds to build, dirt to move and fences to put up to keep out marauding deer and nibbling voles. Then I missed a second week’s entry, but there were seedlings to get in the ground, seeds to water and mulch to procure and spread. As the spring’s vigorous weed pressure threatened my plants, I missed a third entry. And that’s when I realized those missed entries were the inspiration for this week’s post.

I’m taking a summer vacation. I’ll tend those plants, pull those weeds, and take time to sit back and enjoy “my glads,” just like Mom did. Eventually I’ll harvest the fruits of my labor, just like Dad did. Throughout the summer, Jay and I will go camping twice and take a long trip with our niece. And whenever we can, we’ll sit in the sun or shade depending on the temperature, to enjoy the long days of our brief but excessive and luxurious Wisconsin outdoors.

© 2026 Josh Feyen

Josh is writing a book titled “Out With It, The Things We Don’t Talk About” he hopes to publish in 2026. Subscribe to his Substack for a weekly dose of his writing. https://joshuafeyen.substack.com

He was raised on a farm in southwest Wisconsin, went to college in Milwaukee, lived abroad for four years on three continents, and now finds himself with stories to tell. In the middle of 2021, Josh set about writing 50 short memoir stories in his 50th year. Today, the main focus of Josh’s 50 in 50 writing journey is to share what he’s learned with his four teenage nieces and nephew. Josh lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Find his other blog posts for True Stories Well Told here.