Having spent most of my life around farming people, I decided years ago that taken all around, they have a better sense of humor than most of their urban cousins. I asked an old dairy farmer neighbor if he thought that was true, he laughed out loud.

"Why, lord yes, son, they have to!" I guess that's why some of the best stories, jokes and colorful speech I remember came from places like the little country stores, the blacksmith shop, the barber shop and the loading dock at the local MFA.

The loading dock was a good place to listen to farmers waiting to pick up feed. It was there that I heard a young man give his opinion on the proposed seat belt law. "My worry is next thing, they'll want them for tractors, and mine's ornery enough without me being strapped to it."

Country stores, in winter time, were wonderful places to hear humor in the expressions people had kept for entire lifetimes: "That man's not worth the salt to cure his hide--after they hang him." Or, "Well, I missed a few stitches on that dress I made her, but I said 'Honey, it'll never be seen from a gallopin' horse.'" And, "Now if Ben gives his boy any cash money, it won't last 'til its gone."

The barber shop was a great place to hear rural exaggeration. Once, during a 3-year Ozark drought, I heard a farmer tell how his hogs had suffered. "My old brood sow dried up when the pond did," he said, "and she fell all to staves to where you could see daylight through her. We had to soak her in the creek all day before she would hold slop."

But the place to hear a story in those days was always the blacksmith shop. Once I got to hear our local smith tell a bunch of us boys, "Now I can make a hitch for a cultivator tongue good as anybody, but I'm not much for fine work. I tried to braze the big wheel on a grandfather clock for an old feller one time and when he took it home that old clock struck 14 times at eight o'clock that night. The old man says, 'Lord have mercy! Get in the bed, Mother; it's later than it's ever been!'"

No wonder farming people find a lot to laugh about. After all, we started this whole thing.