Hey there, Jen here, and this is a happy bit. I want to talk a little bit about stories from my life growing up on the farm.

Earlier this week, you heard from my mom, Wanda Johnson, in the episode. And she shared a little bit about what it was like growing up on a farm.

She grew up on a farm. I did as well. And with that, there's just

tons and tons and tons of outdoor play and outdoor experiences. And I want to share a few of

those. So growing up on the farm, we did a lot of work, as you heard in the episode this week.

We walked beans. We picked up rocks from the fields so they

wouldn't kind of destroy the equipment, the combine and the various things driving through there.

We would pick up sticks in our yard. We had a big garden for vegetables. My mom had huge flower

gardens. We mowed the lawn. So as kids on a farm, we grew up driving various pieces of farm

equipment and big lawn mowers and vehicles very, very, very young. And so you may or may not agree with this,

but it just happens on the farm. So by age eight, I knew how to drive. So did both

of my brothers. In fact, I think my little brother, Jeff, was driving by age six. He could barely

see over the dash, and he could even drive a little stick shift. At that age, I know, it sounds insane.

Now, we weren't driving on the roads, really. If we did,

it was a quarter of a mile to the nearest field. But I remember one time my brother Josh and I

took our Ford Zephyr station wagon out into the field because we wanted to drive it.

And my dad said, okay for some reason. I think as a parent now, it was crazy of them.

So rather than drive up and down the rows, we drove against the rows. Let me explain what that means. When farmers plant a

crop, there are kind of higher spots and lower spots. So the higher spots might be where the

corn was or where the beans

were. And so you could drive up and down those rows with the grain of the contours of the

field, but we thought it'd be funny to drive against them and bouncing the car the whole way.

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