Remembering a day’s work as a child

Here I am, ready for a day’s work. Helping Daddy kept me busy not only then but until I went off to university. After all, girls do whatever job needs to be done if they have no brothers.

I don’t remember when this pump provided water for the house, located just to the right of this picture or the lane went off around the house, but the driving shed and the barn beyond were always there. The tree provided shade while machinery was repaired or when games and reading took up free time.

Perhaps it wasn’t long after this that I spent the morning assisting Daddy and neighbour, Les Anderson, in the barn as they built stalls or prepared for water troughs being added in front of the cows.

When a hammer went missing, I informed them that it was “down in under beneath.” Les retrieved it, laughing his memorable laugh, and that expression served to point out lost things for many years in both our families.

While Mum sat on a milk stool milking the cows, I made myself useful holding their tails so that the book Mum had balanced on her kneel while she read to me, didn’t end up in the gutter. From that early beginning, Mum and I always arranged our jobs so that one of us could read to the other as we worked.

A few years later, we acquired our first tractor, a John Deere with narrow front wheels. One day Daddy, a neighbour and I were out on the Southline with the tractor for some reason. I guess Daddy decided it was time for me to learn something new; so, he sat me on the seat, put the tractor in the lowest gear with only a minimum of gas and told me to take it home.

I moved at a snail’s pace up the road and turned in the driveway without incident. But then panic struck. He hadn’t told me how to stop it! Even though he was close behind, likely planning to assist, I proceeded to head for the fence and a few twisted wires gave evidence for quite some time of how I stopped the tractor.

In my teens, it was a Case tractor on which I spent hours, raking and baling hay or working the summer fallow. When I did a day’s supply teaching at Huron Heights Public School in Kincardine, during retirement many years later, I told the students that I used to drive a tractor on the land where the school was located. I’m not sure they believed me.

While I was in Ontario last week, I filled my head with pictures of crops soon ready for harvest and thoughts of tractors and drivers going back and forth as work progressed.