Where Happiness Comes From by Tonia L. HarmonTheir farm was two hundred acres of corn fields, cows, pigs, and, of course, chickens. No farm would be complete without chickens. At the southeast corner of the farm, behind the smaller corn field, was the brook with clear cold water that reached past my knees. On most weekends my family would go to visit our friends, the Tailors, who had at one time seven boys to keep them company. All of them were grown with their own lives to attend to, except for Dan, who stayed on at the farm to help keep up the crops. His younger brother Dave still came back to the farm, from the busy city, to visit and bring his children to see their grandparents. Even though they were about the same age as my brother and I, we did not play with them because they were greedy and didn't suit our playing qualifications by continuously changing rules and cheating. It was rare that we encountered them anyhow, and that suited us fine. Most of the time we would stay the whole weekend. Our parent's elected to sleep in a tent, while my brother and I slept in one of the many cozy bedrooms of the farmhouse. We loved it there and secretly both he and I wished that we could stay forever.There were separate reasons why we loved it there. My brother, Forest, had a choice of over a dozen different old cars and trucks. Forest was allowed under the hoods so that he could tinker with the engines and figure out how they functioned. He was a ten-year old mechanical genius. Everyone knew that he was going to grow up to be a mechanic. When he was five or six, Forest found an old transmission behind the barn; in two hours he had taken it apart and put it back together again without prior instruction. Old mister Tailor watched from a distance while Forest disassembled and methodically assembled the transmission to its original form.Our parent's are proud and still equally impressed as the day it happene...
