In my most recent post, I referred to a type of shovel I used to shovel snow as a kid. I wrote it was a coal shovel, used to stoke our coal furnace in those good, old smokestack days of the late ‘40s.

Well, I was wrong. (Mark the date; it’s not that I’m seldom wrong; I just seldom admit it.)

The long-handled, straight-nosed shovel I referred to was actually used -- in my family, anyway -- for a more homely chore: shoveling manure.

My siblings and I were not raised on a farm, but with a farm. My Dad had grown up on this farm, in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts. It had been in our family since 1903. He actually tried moving our little family there shortly after I was born, but it didn’t work out. Back to the city we went. So I wasn’t raised on a farm.

But that farm was a part of our lives. Every Sunday, at least, we were there, for an old-fashioned farmhouse dinner -- roast chicken (almost always) with mashed potatoes and giblet gravy. But there was price to be paid: Dad put in more than enough time helping out to earn those dinners. Because Dad would often fill in for our ailing uncle -- the flu, usually -- for a week or so at a time.

Now part of helping out on a small dairy farm is tending to the cows and their basic needs. And one of those needs is … well, cleaning up after them.

That’s where the shovel came in. You wanted a long-handled, wide, square-nosed shovel to scoop the manure from the gutters behind the stalls where the cows stood. If you’ve never been in a cow barn, there were two rows of stanchions which held the cows. The cows stood on a platform that was just long enough for comfort, but short enough for their hind ends to hang over the gutters, down into which plopped their poop whenever the urge came upon them.

The shovel’s long handle was desirable for two reasons: 1. You didn’t have to get down too close to the product of the cows’ digestive processes, and 2. You could more easily swing the shovel-load up into the manure carrier that ran on ceiling tracks down the middle of the aisle between the two gutters.

Oh, Dad and my uncle didn’t miss often; an occasional splatter, maybe. But when I got big enough to help, and was given a shot at heaving the manure (or slinging the sh … you know what I mean), that was another story. Let’s say there was a fair amount of cleaning up afterwards until I got the hang of it.

You could get a fair amount of … whatever … you were shoveling into that scoop and the handle gave good leverage. And Dad was used to it. So that’s why Dad got the long-handled shovel I used to clear the snow from our walks and driveway in the city.

As for the coal pile in the basement -- yes, we had one, until we converted to oil sometime around 1947 or so -- it was flat-nosed, but had a short handle. In retrospect, that was the one I should have used to shovel snow. But it was in the basement, the long-handled one was in the garage and I just assumed it was the snow-shoveling one because Dad used it that way himself.

And you know what “assume” does, don‘t you?