I don't know...
I can't explain how fortunate my life has been.
I've worked hard my whole life. I started baling hay at 12. The bales weighed half of me. At $3 an hour, nobody could stop me from moving them. The Rough's fed me this awesome dinner after a day in the field. He was older, grandpa aged, and complained about the raspberry seeds getting stuck under his dentures. That family lived quite far away, but I made a little money, and it slightly cut my energy levels helping me sleep at night. The dinners after a hard days work were amazing. Being the smallest didn't seem to cut me much from the hierarchy of the situation. The "hierarchy" was established by work ethic. At that time, I had no idea what "work ethic" meant. Getting the bales of hay stacked into the loft was the task. At 135 pounds dealing with a 70lb bale of hay coming up the conveyor belt followed by more less than 5 feet apart in the loft of a barn in 100 degree temps was a challenge my body loved in some sort of sadistic way that I've seemed to carry with me.throughout life.
The next farm was pretty much similar to the first, except I was 13 and practically an adult. Somehow my weight hadn't changed, but I was nearly 2 inches taller. The Blacks had pretty much the same thing going. A tractor pulled a baling machine, the baler spit the bales onto a wagon where one guy (Donny Black) would stack the bales on the wagon. Another older guy, Dave (Black) would take the trailer full of bales of hay to someone's barn they either owned or rented, and we would stack them in the loft. These were basically the second farmers I worked with while in my nearly preteen years. The first ones spoiled me completely with the complete "dinner after a hard days work". It was an amazing thing that dinner that the Rough's gave. You might imagine a 13 year old skinny kid, a bit shy, after a day of expending energy moving 600 bales of hay, waiting for Mrs Black to come out of the house and say that supper is ready.
It didn't happen. She never came out. Dinner didn't happen.
SORRY for the interruption but I just googled "baling hay" because I wasn't sure I was spelling it right. I was desperate. I hate to use "google" for much of anything after seeing how much my young friends seem to rely on it, rather than learning things on their own.
The Blacks lived down the road from my parents house. We had two acres, Mr Black, Addison Black, had 200 just south of us and much further down Borror road. Mr Black would sometimes pull his glasses out of his gray mechanics looking shirt complete with chest pockets and a collar, and put them on to look at the mole on my neck. He thought it was a tick. It happened several times while I was young. Now that I'm older, I understand how year after year you might make that mistake forgetting how you made the same mistake last year. Mr Black, at 72, was probably in better shape than I am now at 52. He told me once that he had never had an ounce of trouble with his teeth, until he went to see a dentist at 64. The dentist was bent on removing his wisdom teeth. Addison, Mr Black, had not only not seen a dentist nearly his entire life, didn't have a toothbrush until he was 40. He also told me some cool stories of the trouble he made as a youth, but asked me not to share. Sorry. Mr. Black did tell me that the Chevy pickup truck that he recently bought (1994) for 24k cost more than the entire 200 acres he owned. He also told me about hiding the electric fence wire in the place where him and his buddies knew the dairy farmer down the road pee'd in every morning. Mr. Black had great stories. I kind of , well, myself and a friend, kind of, well duplicated Mr. Blacks electrocution thing ..with a modern twist. Myself and a friend used a taser on the copper pipes leading to his dads shower. We might have gotten away with it had we not been laughing so hard.
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