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Wild Krumpos

Year

1978

11 entries

  1. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    The Allis-Chalmers WD

    Event Date: 1978–1985 Drafted: 2025-11-23 The Allis-Chalmers WD was the largest living creature on our little hobby farm, although of course it wasn’t alive. To me it felt alive: a friendly, orange-bellied giant that slumbered in the tractor shed until…

  2. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    Event Date: 1978–1985

    Event Date: 1978–1985 Drafted: 2025-11-23 Under the back porch was my first worldbuilding studio. A low crawlspace of shadow and sunbeams, it was a place adults rarely entered — small, dusty, mysterious. The dirt was soft and untouched except for…

  3. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    The Central Yard Fence

    Event Date: 1978–1984 Drafted: 2025-11-23 The central yard was a fenced-in square of pure childhood — the space where the goats lived, the chickens pecked, the ducks waddled, and “old grandpa goose” reigned with tyrannical authority. The fence itself was…

  4. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    Event Date: 1978–1981 (approx.)

    Event Date: 1978–1981 (approx.) Drafted: 2025-11-23 Most kids had swing sets. We had rusted farm machinery. Old implements sat half-buried in the soil like dinosaur skeletons: the grain drill, the seeder, the baler with its heavy iron teeth, the hay…

  5. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    The Goat Pen: Kingdom of Trouble

    Event Date: 1978–1984 Drafted: 2025-11-23 Goats are nature’s little anarchists. Our goat pen — a muddy, straw-covered plot beside the barn — was the first place I learned how personalities existed in animals: stubbornness, curiosity, mischief, even something like humor.…

  6. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    Event Date: 1978–1984

    Event Date: 1978–1984 Drafted: 2025-11-23 To an adult, the sand pile near the back porch was just… sand. Nothing remarkable. A place where new topsoil was dumped or where rain carved temporary gullies. To kids? It was a continent. That…

  7. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    Mom

    She was beautiful. Everyone loved her. She was the center of my universe, and she built the world I grew up in — or rather she cleared the ground and handed me the tools and let me build my own,…

  8. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    The Cedars That Held Me

    Behind Floyd and Deena Nelson’s farmhouse grew a stand of ancient cedar trees — gnarled, knotted, and shaped by wind and weather into natural forts. If the house was a place of grown-up conversation and coffee, the cedars were a…

  9. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    The Ditch

    One of my earliest memories begins with a car in a ditch. Not metaphorically. Literally. My father was driving home from work at the Royal Scot, where he cooked long hours, and somewhere only a country block from home—so close…

  10. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    Event Date: 1978–1983

    Event Date: 1978–1983 Drafted: 2025-11-23 The barn was really two barns under one roof — two different universes connected by a central core of beams and dust and old wood. 1. The Animal Realm (The Living Barn) Warm. Humid. Breathing.…

  11. Sunday, January 1, 1978 · Don Krumpos

    Under the Porch Kingdom

    Every kid has a kingdom, and mine was under the porch. The house we lived in had these hollow concrete support pillars, square and mysterious, holding up the east-side porch like sentinels. They were the kind of structures that adults…