Back on the Farm is a collection of 176 humorous stories Harold Sullivan wrote for his grandchildren about growing up on a farm in Comet, West Virginia, during the ’30s and ’40s. The moments that were the basis of the stories were frozen in time for the author, and his fond retelling— “When I was a boy, back on the farm” —recreates that life in the reader’s mind too. His stories are of small triumphs, giant failures, and a few in between. They are funny tales of his relationship with his younger sister, whom as one story recounts, he convinced to let him shoot her with a homemade BB gun. This sister then pretended it didn’t hurt so she would shoot him too! Many of the stories are about his hardworking mother, such as the time Harold and his sister made mud pies with eggs from the farm (a huge financial loss in the Depression) and Momma spanked them twice—once for the act and again when she found they had taken all the eggs. The hero of many of his stories was his father, a “big man” in many ways, whose battle with the “pushy cow” showed the personality of the man—and of the cow. Harold’s stories are of a way of life that doesn’t exist anymore in the tiny community of Comet, West Virginia, which doesn’t exist anymore either. But for the people who lived there, or for anyone who has lived on a farm, the tales from Harold’s memory bring back a simpler time worth revisiting. These stories, of a boy growing up among hardworking and close-knit family and community, are a love song to life, Back on the Farm.

--Harold W. Sullivan

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