Tracing My Farming Roots: Hard Work

                During the Depression my grandparents raised their young family on a farm. It was hard work from sunup to sundown. The kids all had chores such as milking the cows, feeding the chickens, gathering eggs and weeding the gardens. They lived almost completely from what they could produce themselves and had very little money.

One story that I have heard a few times from my dad is when his father had gone to the mill and purchased several bags of flour to last the family through the winter. Grandpa was driving over the river on an icy bridge, the wagon tipped over and the flour sunk to the bottom of the icy river. The bags were left there because they thought it was lost. A neighbor told my grandpa that he could retrieve the bags of flour in the spring, but my grandpa worried and stressed about it all winter. In the early spring, too early to be diving into the river, when there was not much left to eat, my grandpa dove to the bottom of the river and recovered the bags. They discovered that a few inches of flour all the way around the edges of the bags had formed a crust and was ruined but the rest could be used. They considered the saved flour to be a miracle.

 I think one of the reasons people think of farmers as honest, hard workers, and dependable men, that embodies the American culture is because of the pride that my Grandpa took in his work. Farmers didn’t take shortcuts with their farms; they couldn’t leave it for someone else to do. It was survival they had to be prepared for the winter and it took spring, summer, and fall to do it. Small Farms depended on the whole family working together to finish all the necessary chores. I read excerpts from, Children’s Work in the Family: It’s Significance and Meaning, the authors conducted a study of children who participate in the care taking of the household chores and found that having mandatory chores has a direct relationship to “independence and responsibility” (White). Farmers require their kids to work hard for the benefit of the family and in turn it benefits the children.

I thought of the chores that I had as a young girl, my siblings and I rotated between different household chores throughout the week and in the summer time the list included outside jobs such as mowing the lawn and picking weeds from the undeveloped section in our yard. We weren’t farmers, but we occasionally heard about the chores my dad had to do as a child. I contribute my being a hard worker and a dependable person to the chores I did as a child. Even so, I did much less than my dad and my children didn’t have to do hardly any chores. What happened if my kids didn’t vacuum the living room twice this week? Nothing, I might get a little upset, but we won’t starve this winter. We burn wood during the winter to heat our home but if we don’t build a fire for one reason or another the heater will automatically kick on. I like to bottle tomatoes and a few other things but we don’t have to have it to survive.

Teaching our children to work hard, earn and appreciate what they have, and be responsible for themselves… That is  part of the American Dream.

Works Cited

 
Hansen, Rebecca. Personal Interview. 15 Jan. 2015.

 White, Lynn K., David B. Brinkerhoff. “Children's Work in the Family: It’s Significance and

            Meaning.” Journal of Marriage and Family. Vol. 43. Nov. 1981. Web. 16 Jan. 2015.