An age old saying said: “the only things sure in this world is death and taxes!” Whether it’s a beautiful flower or yourself; death is something that no one can argue about. Taxes are something that can change faster than many chartered accountants can keep up to date on.
After WW1, a “temporary” income tax was introduced to get our country back on their feet after the tremendous costs of war. The word “temporary” seems to have taken on a whole new meaning. All levels of government must have lawyers who stay awake all night thinking of new taxes that our citizens will not notice or object strongly about.
When I was a kid some of our relatives bought “Irish sweepstake” tickets with the hope of making it big. None of them did, but it was only a few years before many of our governments brought in their own lottery to . . .
supplement tax dollars. Even if you win big and are the only winner; by the time you pay taxes on your win, it isn’t near as big as you had imagined.
My dad used to say “if you wished in one hand and crapped in the other, you can bet on which one will be full first. Good luck was when you were blessed with a healthy, live calf, or enough rain to “fill the grain.”
When my first ancestor first came to his allotted farm land, he walked carrying a very few belongings on is back. When things got better, he brought his wife along and maybe even bought a horse. Cutting trees, clearing land, building a shelter (not a house), planting, and harvesting was all done by hand.
Early medicine was taught to him by our first nation people who had learned by trial and error. Early purchases were mostly completed with a “barter” system with neighbors. If a man’s word was no good, the word quickly got around. Even childbirth was helped by a neighbor because the closest doctor was a couple days walk away.
Most families were excited to get their first milk cow. Every farm kept a few chickens for eggs and a chicken’s life was ended when visitors arrived for Sunday dinner. Beef and pork were traded back and forth between farmers whenever a farmer butchered an animal because there was no refrigeration.
A vacation was when you broke your leg and had to take it easy for a short time. A few bags of seed grain for spring planting were bartered for by trading something with the neighbor who had the best crop in the area. This was how many farmers got their seed grain until the nineteen-fifties.
Weed control was mostly done with timed cultivation (the weeds were allowed to germinate before final light tillage followed by planting the seed.) Noxious weeds were pulled by hand and either hand hoeing or cultivation with a one-horse cultivator was done between the corn rows once the corn was up a few inches.
Chemical weed control didn’t become the norm until after WW2 as a result of chemicals developed during the war. Big jobs that required many hands; like threshing, sawing wood, building any building needed on the farm, and even hunting which required several to chase. These were well attended social events where ladies worked together to try to make the best dish.
Fishing was more of a family outing that supplied greatly needed fish. As families became better established; a nice wagon or even a buggy or sleigh was added to better carry the family than a single horse. Grandpa never had a driver’s license and after he had watched a couple cars drive by at the break net speed of ten miles per hour, he said “don’t sell your horse yet, those autocars are just a fad!”
Dad built our first tractor in the 1930s, by cutting most of the body and the rear end of an old chev car and by using an autotrac kit sold by the Otaco company, he bolted lugged, steel wheels where the car’s rear end was.
Dad never owned a tractor with a cab to keep the rain off or the cold away. Dad’s most used tractor was a little 32 horse gray Ferguson which he farmed three hundred acres with. When fall plowing, he never topped for lunch. He punched a hole in the top of the can and set it on the manifold to warm up. One day he forgot to punch a hole in the top and after plowing about a thousand feet down the field, the can of beans exploded and all afternoon he could only smell the cooked beans all over the motor but never got to eat.
As we sit on an “air-ride seat” in a heated, air-conditioned cab, listening to an FM radio in a machine that is possibly steered by GPS, we think, “how lucky we are” until one of the computers in the machine quits and as we walk home, we begin to think, “maybe some changes came to quickly without enough testing.”
When some weeds become resistant to some of our most popular sprays and diseases appear that didn’t exist fifty years ago, and some early abortions and fetal deformations mysteriously appear; we wonder if adequate testing was done before releasing this supposedly superior seed or chemical spray was released onto the market. An old friend of mine once said, “young fellow, no matter what the government does to you; the best will survive.”
