Down on the Farm, Way Back When
by Stephen Nelson

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Dad would warn me to stay back from the barn door when he let the cows out for the first time at the end of a long winter. After taking a few steps outside, you might see a mature cow do something you wouldn’t expect: Jump in the air! Quite a feat, considering a mature cow weighs about 1,500 pounds. Stephen Nelson’s childhood memories are an impressionist painting of another time; a time when each family on the shared phone line had a particular ring, and a time when a little boy carefully carried buckets of fresh, warm milk to feed the calves by hand. There’s a lot that people who’ve never lived on a family farm don’t know—and with farms consolidating fewer and bigger, snapshots like Stephen’s are a rare breed. This collection is rich with sights, sounds, scents (not just the obvious one!), and the kind of details only someone who’s been there can tell you. Down on the Farm, Way Back When is a walk down memory lane for those who know and a time machine for those who don’t.

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Stephen Nelson grew up on his parents’ dairy farm in Campbellford, Ontario, from the 1960s to the 1980s; these stories are his, from his childhood and youth. Stephen’s hopes for his debut, a memoir, are to share the part of his life that his city friends always asked him about—to make you laugh and sigh, to help you understand what that world really looked like. Well practiced after a stint as a publishing policy writer and with a membership to the Ottawa Independent Writers, there’s no one better to bring you the “farm” end of your farm-to-table story. Nowadays, Stephen lives in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec.

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Stephen Nelson