I’ve been thinking of my brother Ernest this morning. It’s his birthday. Wish I could see him again. Wish I could hear him laugh. Remember at our gatherings how you could hear him enjoying a good story with a group of people. Others were attracted to him, I think, because he could find humor in every-day things. He had a good heart and a lot of friends. He also had a lot of courage. Here’s a little story that Dad told me.
Before Dad had bought the Owen Warfield’s farm, there was “new ground”, as farmers called it, to be cultivated along a hill road back of the Ethel Warfield place. It had partially been cleared of saplings and rocks and stumps, but it was still very, very rough ground, never cultivated before. Dad set the task of plowing that ground to Ernest. It was later that he realized what an enormous job it was for a boy so young. It would have been an extremely hard job for any experienced adult man. Later Dad was sorry he had given Ernest such a hard job. “He was too little. I shouldn’t have made him do it.” And yet Ernest did it. You can imagine a young boy trying to keep the horse pulling and the plow plowing. But Ernest didn’t give up easily. That’s courage.