The Workforce
This is the time of the year when memories come flooding to me. The leaves are just about off of the trees, the garden produce has been harvested and stored or canned and the acres of corn and soybeans have been harvested. So what does go on at a farmyard after harvest and before the snow flies? No twiddling of thumbs I can assure you.
Raymond and Lena’s Workforce: Elvera, Noreen, Calvin and Michael. In the photo: Elvera’s dress was pink taffeta with rhinestone buttons. My dress was aqua with a white eyelet bodice front made by my mom. The boys had on tan plaid zip front coveralls. The memories bring a smile sliding down my cheeks.
The first order of business was getting the Workforce outfitted with proper attire: hats, everyday clothes and gloves . . . that fit well. After school, we would join Dad at the site where logs had been collected since last year at the same time. We could hear the tractor long before we saw the setup: a huge saw blade setup, run by a rubber belt getting its power from the flywheel on the Allis Chalmers tractor.
Dad had been cutting logs all the day long into chunks of various sizes. A wooden flair box wagon hooked to a second tractor was a bit of a distance away, with the amount of cut wood making a huge heap that rose over the sides. A second flair box wagon was close to the saw and Dad was cutting and chucking chunks of wood into the second wagon with energy as fresh with his rhythm as if he had just started the project and not having been at it for most of the day.
Elvera’s job was to pull the filled wagon box as close as possible to the west basement window of the house. Myself, Calvin and Michael were in the basement waiting for Elvera to begin tossing the chunks of wood through the window. Much like a chain gang, Michael and Calvin then threw the cut wood to me where I would begin stacking it, beginning at a point farthermost from either side of the window. The stacking was an art in itself. The first row pointing out with the second row lying across, followed by a row pointing out. So it went. Two loads a day after school, with the big finale coming over the MEA weekend. Over a period of time the wood room that was as wide as the house by eight feet deep was filled to the top with neatly stacked wood to tide the family over the winter. There were a fair amount of crushed fingers or sore toes as the tossing of the wood did get a bit out of hand. A chunk of wood is heavy, but coming at an appendage via a toss made the impact more severe. Oh, don’t worry, just to make sure, we also stacked quite a few wagons of wood in the machine shed – just in case the winter was longer and more severe than we had anticipated. Surprisingly, quarrels were rare. We just wanted to finish this yearly task.
Once the sore bodies, fingers and toes were healed over, the Workforce mustered together for their reward. Those very same wooden flair box wagons were pulled out to the harvested corn fields with Elvera at the helm and the three of us hanging on while being in the wagon. Elvera would park the wagons in good strategic places. All four of us began walking the corn rows, each carrying a five gallon pail, seeking and searching for ears of corn that the corn picker had missed. It was now our turn to chuck ears of corn into the wagon. With each five gallon pail emptied into the wagon we could see dollar signs. The deal with Dad was, that after the fields had been walked with the wagons holding OUR harvest, Dad would pull the wagons to the elevator in town. The money from the loads of ear corn was ours to split four ways. Hooray!
I can tell you that we counted our stash, we fingered our stash, we planned and schemed. This was our money to spend on Christmas presents in Hutchinson, most likely at the Ben Franklin or Woolworth stores. We were rolling in dough. I have no doubt that Mom and Dad may have added to the pot. We never were given allowances per say, for being our parent’s social security, aka: workers when work needed to be done, equals a steady benefit. We all worked together and we generally worked very well together.
As I said earlier on: the fall season is steeped in memories for me.
In life, please remember to give and have no memory of it, or take and remember it always.
