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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 12:52:20 GMT -6
Chapter 39 August, 2015
Charlene's perpetual smile was gone. In its' place was a rather downcast look with what I thought was fright in her eyes. Overall, I liked that better. Howard didn't say a word about his wife, and his expression had gone from his normal deadpan or ready smile to a look of grim determination. I let him have what space he needed. He seemed to relish taking over the evening barn chores. I wanted to do the morning chores to have a look at all the critters, in case there was a problem of any sort.
There was enough to keep everyone busy, but the young people didn't know what to do and were generally underfoot for the first couple weeks. I tried to find something for all the men to do each day, but that organization effort took time, and it took even more of my time to teach the guys how to do even the simplest of tasks they had never seen before.
Daniel and Ryan, however, had both worked as construction laborers and were familiar with the use of a shovel. Kevin took his turns digging and was a fair hand as a go-fer, so he got to do a lot of that and learned fast where we kept things. Josh helped show him where things were and told him why we kept things in certain places. Josh made sure he put things away in the right places, too.
I got the young men busy digging a hole for an old chest type freezer I'd bought from Billy Montgomery, the appliance guy. We put it in the hillside behind the welding shop, since that steep slope was pretty worthless for anything else. I planned to simply stack some straw bales over it for winter, and cover that with a tarp. It would keep it from freezing and make it possible to get into it even if we had a lot of snow and ice.
The young women got schooled on canning, drying, and preserving food. Tammy knew quite a bit and Charlene did, too, so that went pretty well. Brittany was interested in the herbs and had bunches of them drying, hanging from strings under the back porch roof. Megan had been the one to find a hammer and drive some nails to hang them on. _________________
The worst problem we had was sleeping space. Our house was simply too small. A three bedroom house is not enough for six couples. We had beds for everyone, but eating space was a problem. The dining room table was strectched out to the max with added leaves and could seat eight. There were only 6 matching chairs for it, but we used a couple steel chairs from the card table set to fill in. The table had drop leaves, so we could fold the 2 steel chairs and drop the table leaves for walking room between meals. That left 4 adults and the baby to eat at the breakfast bar.
Kitchen counter space had never been enough in the U-shaped kitchen, and always had women running into each other as they worked there. More than one collision resulted in spilled gravy or iced tea. When the weather was nice, some of us ate on the back porch where we had a round painted concrete table with benches that would handle another 3 or 4 adults. Tammy and Hailey often ate out there, since the kid tended to be messy.
There was little to no room for personal items, so we all had to be careful to keep our things put away as best we could. but things still got misplaced and lost. You had to be careful where you walked, lest you step on Hailey or some of her toys. Tammy did the best she could, but it was still a problem that led to short tempers. Most of us spent a fair amount of time outdoors to have more space. __________________
Carmen and Brenda had talked on the phone when the furniture truck arrived, but Carmen had wisely stayed out of the way until the dust settled a bit. Carmen and David came down to say hello after the crowd had been here for just over a week.
"Hi everybody! We thought it was time to come over. This is David Martin, my new husband."
Charlene said, "Congratulations! Sorry we don't have a wedding present, but you have our wishes for a happy marriage." She was her old smiling self again, rising to the social occassion.
It was getting close to lunch time and preparations were under way. There was something of an assembly line going from the fridge, to the stove then on to the bar and the table. Carmen said, "This reminds me of our old family holiday gatherings with people everywhere."
Brenda said, "That's what it's like, only 3 times a day."
Carmen was surprised when more young people came in the back door, some sitting down at the table, others off to wash up, and Brittany coming in with a big sack of salad stuff from the garden. She shouldered her way through the crowd to the sink and began to wash the greens.
Carmen told David, "Let's step out on the porch and give them room to work."
Once outside, I overheard her tell David, "We have to DO something! They've got a dozen people trying to live here, and they don't have room. We have that huge house and just us two in it. Would you agree to taking in some of them? You don't have to do it. It's your house, really."
David said, "We have the room, no doubt about that, but I don't think we can feed many more. We can't afford the food."
"What if Brenda and Jack do that? They're feeding them now. I can talk to him if it's all right with you."
David said, "I've been thinking about it since you told me your family all came here. I guess things are different now. We can't just let people do without. Yeah we can give them a place to stay, but we're for sure going to need some help."
Lunch was going when they came back inside. Carmen said loud enough for all to hear, "Listen up folks. We have a proposal to make."
As the table talk died down, Carmen began again. David and I have this big house on the other side of the barn down there. We would like to invite Ryan and Megan, and Brittany and Kevin to come stay with us. We'll need some help with food, but we have a wood cook stove so we're not going to run out of gas to cook with, and there are plenty of bedrooms and closets. I guess if you four keep on working for Jack, maybe he can pay you with food or something. You'll have to work that out. What does everybody think?"
It got to be a family meeting then. Carmen was aware of the sleeping arrangements and knew it would help greatly to have our living room again if those two couples had somewhere else to be. Brenda was looking relieved. I saw that and said, "I'll go for that, if they want to do it."
Megan and Brittany looked at their husbands like they had better agree, or else.
Charlene said, "David, are you sure this is all right with you? Our family tends to look out for each other and we do things like this. Do you think it would be okay?"
David said, "Well, we have room and we can keep it warm this winter with the wood stove, but we'll have to come up with more groceries somehow. We can't buy groceries, even if the stores were open. We're broke like everybody else since the money went bad. I don't know if I'll have a job this Fall, either. I drive a school bus and I sell stuff on the internet, but that's no good since the banks are all closed."
Brenda said, "We have food. It might not be just what you want to eat, but we have a LOT of food. If you young folks want to move there, food won't be a problem."
Britanny was sitting by Megan and had been whispering to her. Megan said, "We can take care of the house for you. We'd love to have more room, if you're sure it's okay."
I said, "We'll get you enough groceries today that it won't be a problem. Carmen, you get with Brenda on that and we can move everything."
After lunch, other projects were let go so everyone could pitch in to move the two couples. It only took a couple hours to do it, including filling the pantry for Carmen and David. I had just ground corn and wheat, so we sifted out 3 gallons of white flour for them and some cornmeal. Biscuits and cornbread had taken the place of bread from the grocery, so those were needed. Our living room got restored to it's normal state, so the furniture truck was empty again. The extra chairs from my den were needed to seat more people. Life might get to be something closer to normal at our house. __________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 12:53:19 GMT -6
Chapter 40 Our hay was ready for a second cutting, so I made plans with all the men to work on that. Not having a second tractor to move wagons, I decided to bale and drop it all on the ground until I was finished. We had enough help that it went fast picking up the hay and moving it to the barn, pulling one wagon with Josh's truck where the ground was level enough that traction wasn't a problem for it, and he could haul a few bales on the truck, too. Fewer people in our house made meals much easier. Ryan and Kevin had the hand pump at David's place to wash up when it was over, so that took a load off our washup facilities, too. The electric power was out again that night, but we didn't mind. The freezer and some lights were running on the solar system. We couldn't power the fridge so we cleaned it out after supper and sat some dishes in it in pans of cool water. Supper was much more relaxed with less hassle in the kitchen and enough room to sit and eat. The house was still full, but it wasn't overflowing. I worried less about he cistern level, but we would keep up our conservation measures. There was enough power to operate the small 12 volt TV, so we turned it on to catch the news. The announcer had a bright smile on. "Something everyone wants to hear now. Banks will reopen tomorrow and the new currency is ready to be exchanged for the old dollars. The new bills will be worth 100 times the old ones, so coins will be more important. The old coins will be used, until more can be minted. A shortage of change is anticipated, but having the banks open means that checks can be used again. Debit cards will be back, too, but the credit card system will take a while longer, since due to the economic problems, banks are going to require a credit check before issuing new cards." I said, "That's just peachy, but I wonder who has any money left now to swap for the old stuff?" Brenda said, "Those gas stations that were charging an arm and both legs for gas should have a lot of money." Josh said, "Yeah, if they're still in business. Most of them were closed the last time we went to town. Heck, almost everything was closed. I don't know how I'd get parts if I had car work to do. Nobody's driving anyway." Howard said, "I haven't seen a truck go past since we've been here, except a couple farm trucks. Hardly any traffic at all." Charlene said, "With gas over $40 a gallon, it's no wonder! Nobody can afford to drive, so I suppose they are just staying home." Tammy said, "Yeah, it's kinda spooky to not hear any traffic. When something goes past now it's strange and we all look to see what it is." I said, "What worries me is how we're going to pay our next electric bill. We had a few bucks in the banks, but we spent all the cash we had." Brenda said, "Somebody will buy silver and we have some of that." Maybe so," I said, "but I'd rather hang on to it unless we have to sell it. I'm afraid we won't get what it's worth now until things settle down." ____________________ Josh didn't need to worry about having something to do in the mechanic shop. Our old tractor decided to spit up a water pump and spew antifreeze all over the barnyard. I was thankful we had the hay in for the year before that happened, but we used the tractor to power the hammermill when we ground feed and flour. We couldn't stand for it to be down for very long. I called the bank and asked for our balance. There was $44.12 left after they deducted "fees" of some kind from the $50 we had left in there. Converted to the new money, that was 44 cents. Oh joy, I thought. I'd have to come up with some money somewhere before we could do anything. Next, I called the jewelry store in town and asked him what he was paying for junk silver coins. He said, "The silver market has been all over the place. I'm sitting it out until things settle down. I don't have that much capital to risk on it right now." "I also have some silver Eagles. Are you interested in those?" He paused and then said, "I could give you a dollar each for up to 20 of them, but that's about my limit." "I'll think about it and let you know," I told him. We drained the radiator to save what antifreeze remained in it, then removed the pump where it sat in the machine shed. The fan belt didn't look all that great either, so we took it home too, hoping I had a belt in my collection that would work. I pressed out the old pump shaft and bearing assembly and called the John Deere dealer. He had a rebuilt water pump and he wanted $21.40 for it, new money. He didn't have just the bearing to replace the old one and couldn't get one until they started shipments again. "We've got to do something," I told Josh. "We need that tractor running. How about you press that old bearing out and I'll go dig in my bearing collection?" He brought the dead bearing in the basement shop a few minutes later and we did some measuring. it was the standard cartridge type made only for water pumps, being one long bearing with a shaft made as an integral part of it. The old shaft came out with a solid hammer blow and bearing balls went everywhere. With that in hand I searched until I found a pair of standard single row ball bearings with the right outer diameter. Three hours later I had machined the hardened shaft to fit the new bearings I had. I hoped the seals were adequate as I pressed the modified shaft and new bearings back into the housing. We found an old cereal box I had saved for gasket material and used my small ball pein hammer to peck out a new gasket for the pump. Josh doped up the flimsy cardboard gasket with lots of sealant and we bolted it all back together. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWbNw7moKl8 (gasket cutting with a hammer) We had only lost about a gallon of coolant which was good, since I didn't have all that much antifreeze to spare. Josh mixed up half a gallon of water with an equal amount of antifreeze and we started the tractor. He refilled the radiator with it running and we watched it until the engine got up to operating temperature. Josh said, "Those bearings we put in it didn't look as heavy as the old ones." "They're not," I told him. "They make the shaft as part of the original bearings so they have room for larger bearing balls. If these last for a year, I'll be tickled to death. That's why I removed the seals on one side of 'em and packed between 'em with grease. Maybe that'll help 'em live longer." "What if they don't?" "I've got 10 more of those bearings in the package." We did find a good belt to replace the old one. I was thankful I'd bought that pallet of belts when an auto repair shop closed and had an auction a couple years before. I knew the repair was less than the best, but it worked and we had the tractor to use again. That was a good thing. _________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 12:54:20 GMT -6
Chapter 41 Late August, 2015
"We're about out of dog food," Daniel said. He had been feeding Sonny and now had a friend for life. "Don't have much cat food either."
I said, "I'll get some corn meal and get Somebody to cook up a batch for him."
"You're going to make dog food?"
"He's gotta eat something, and we're flat broke until we can sell some hogs or something. This would be a fine evening to shoot a couple squirrels, or a rabbit to mix in the dog food. You want to do that? Sonny will be glad to help."
"Sounds okay to me. It beats a lot of other farm jobs," he said with a grin.
"Take my .22 rifle. I've got more shells for it than anything else."
He left to get the rifle as Bill Woodruff came in riding a very old bicycle. It was one of the old heavy single speed kind that would be tough going in this hilly country. There was something black and greasy in the basket on the handlebars, and a cardboard box in one of the rear baskets. Bill was tired, from the look of him, and he had worked up a good sweat pedalling the mile and a half from his place.
"Whatcha got there?"
"The gearbox off my manure spreader. It's got a bolt broke off in it and I ain't had no luck gittin' it out. I brought 2 pounds of butter to get you interested in fixin' it, since I ain't got any money. The damn milk truck ain't showed up to pick up milk fer over a month now, and I doubt if a check from the dairy would be good anyways. Better get this butter cold a'fore it melts. I cooled it in the springhouse, but it's warm by now. If you want more than that, you let me know and I'll bring you somethin'."
I told him that was more than enough and tossed the butter in the freezer. I came back outside noting that the freezer had a lot less meat in it now.
Daniel came back with a small raccoon about the time I had drilled out the offending bolt end and cleaned the hole with a tap. I dug around and found an old bolt that fit, then cleaned it up with a die and gave it to Bill. He was delighted and pedalled slowly off towards home.
Daniel and I skinned the raccoon and gave the liver and heart to Sonny for finding it. The rest we washed with cool water from the hand pump and took it inside to cook it off the bones. The stove was busy with the pressure canner on it and the women were busy tending that, so I got out the big old cast iron Dutch Oven and we went back outside. Daniel fetched the tripod we used for cooking down lard and I hung the kettle on it while he went to the woodpile. In half an hour the kettle was boiling well so we went to the shade to rest while it cooked.
The women were delighted with the butter, having run out of what we'd had in the freezer some time ago. Our late sweet corn was ripe so we would have a treat for supper that night. It was late evening when we go the raccoon meat picked off and ran it through the hand cranked meat grinder. Sonny had been real interested in the project all afternoon and made a pest of himself. While we worked on the 'coon meat I had a batch of cornmeal boiling in the dutch oven, and had Heather stirring it to keep it from sticking. It thickened up nicely so I added the ground meat a little at a time and a little mineral salt we used in animal feed. I kicked the fire out and put the lid on the kettle, then carried it to the porch to cool off. After a good supper, we packaged the dog food in portions and let it cool completely before putting most of it in the freezer. That batch would only last Sonny and Kitty cat about 10 days. This could get to be a real hassle, I thought. We could find ways to do without money, but it all took more time and work. _______________
"Jack, we're running out of toilet paper," Brenda said. "We might have enough for a week, but then it will be the the old fashioned cleaning rag thing."
"Ugh. What a way to start the day," I said. "I have a few bundles of those red shop rags. They aren't new, but they're clean. I'll find those and put 'em in the bathrooms."
"So, look in the barn loft for something to put the dirty rags in, 'cause we're going to need it soon. Has to have a lid to keep the smell under control until we can wash them. We'll need one for each bathroom, maybe a just a plastic bucket with a lid? I could put some water and bleach in the bucket."
"I'll see what I can find. I may have to wash out an old oil bucket or something. The bathrooms are going to get crowded."
"We can set the bucket by the diaper pail in the bathtub, and in the shower in the half bath." she said.
I found some buckets and put Heather to work washing the oil film out of them, then Daniel and I got busy on expanding the chicken lot. The more grass and bugs the hens ate, the less feed I needed to grind. While we did that, Ryan and Kevin were busy transplanting strawberry runner plants to expand the patch. Tammy was picking cucumbers while Brenda and Charlene cleaned some crocks getting ready to make pickles.
I hoped the supply of sugar and vinegar held out until we could get more. We could make vinegar from the worst of the apples this Fall, but vinegar was cheap to buy while sugar wasn't something we could do. It made for some hard choices of where to spend our time. I was thinking about these things as I went to get more steel posts for the chicken pen and noticed something slide down inside my pants leg. My pocket knife had fallen on the ground. I picked it up and felt inside my pocket. Yep. It had a hole in it. I put the knife in the other front pocket and made a mental note to see about patching that pocket.
Daniel was still banging away with the post driver. The ground was too hard and dry to be driving steel posts, but we had a batch of young chickens hatched out so they needed more room. I realized I should be counting the chicks as a blessing, but it was way too hot to be building fence. The garden needed watering, so when the boys finished with the strawberries, I'd have them do it from the irrigation tank. Thankfully, it was still 3/4 full. The house cistern was down to 39" of water. We needed rain. Heck, we needed toilet paper, sugar, vinegar, meat, and most of all, money to pay for it all. The hogs wouldn't be ready to sell for another couple months, and I was praying that there would be a market for them by that time.
I passed by the garden on the way back with an armload of posts and noticed we had some cantaloupe that were ripe. That would be good with supper this evening, which was something to look forward to. I resolved to take my blessings where I found them. _________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 12:55:34 GMT -6
Chapter 42
I had seen Josh working on something that day in the basement garage but paid no attention to what it was. He knew what we needed done, so I usually left him alone to do it. I was surprised to see that he had found some old hinges and got the rust off of them, then gave them a coat of aluminum spray paint just in time to go on the gate for the new chicken pen. It was a small thing, but it was just what we needed right then. I thanked him and got busy on the gate. By supper time, we had a chicken pen. _______________
That evening I saw the telephone/internet and electric bills had come in the mail. I knew I'd have to sell some silver or do without both of them. We had 47 one ounce silver Eagles, and the junk silver coins left. The internet was working and the power was on that night, so I checked Kitco's site and found it was up and running again. The spot prices were given in the new currency values which looked really strange to me. It was hard to get used to everything being priced at 1% of the old numbers. So, even though in the past gold had sold as high as $1800 an ounce, it was hard to accept that at $29.94 it had gone UP in price, dramatically. Realizing that, I ran down the page to find silver spot was $1.86 an ounce and was thrilled. I needed to check around before I sold any. The whole currency mess seemed to be settling down now.
The next morning I learned that our bank was paying spot minus 5%, so I called the jeweller again. He said he would pay spot minus 2%, so he got the bid. I took 10 silver Eagles in town and got $18.32. The electric bill was 84 cents, and the telephone/internet bill was 68 cents. I deposited $12 in the bank and mailed a check to pay the electric bill, then went to the internet office and paid that one in cash. Postage stamps were one cent now, which was outrageous, I thought. It equated to a dollar in the old money. I looked at the 16 cents I got in change from paying the phone bill and it finally hit me that we should look around home for some loose change, since it was now worth 100 times as much. Even a penny on the sidewalk was not to be ignored.
I stopped at the grocery and bought a couple 10 pound bags of sugar for 8 cents a bag, and 2 gallons of white vinegar for 2 cents each. My bill was 22 cents, counting the 10% sales tax. It sounded so ridiculously cheap, but I figured out quickly that those prices were high. I used to buy 10 pounds of sugar for $6.29, and cheap white vinegar for $1.59 a gallon, so prices were actually up quite a bit. I got on the internet as soon as I got home and found that corn was quoted at 5.88 cents a bushel and hogs were selling for 94 cents a hundredweight. That sounded pretty good to me. A hog weighing 213 pounds would bring $2.00, so things weren't so bad for a hog farmer. We had 42 head of hogs that would be ready to sell by mid-October.
The cattle market wasn't quite so good. Cattle had been over $3.00 a pound last year, but now were going for $2.62 per hundredweight. Still, a grown steer at 1,000 pounds would bring $26.20 now. We had 14 head that would be ready for market by late this Fall, so if we sold all of them, that would be about $105.00. More feeder cattle would cost a lot of that, but there was profit to be made. It was going to take time to get used to the new prices.
I wrote down all the figures I had found and showed it all to Brenda. She said, "So, I just move the decimal over 2 places and that would the prices in the old money, right?"
"Yeah, that's right. It took a while for it to soak in my head. I'm still not used to it."
She thought about that for a while and said, "We're still poor."
"Yep. Really, our earnings are way down, and everything we need to buy has gone up. And, we have a dozen people to support. Bottom line is, we have to find some way for those people to make some money. Josh is off to a good start. When things get moving a little better he'll have enough mechanic work to do. I don't know what to think about the rest of them, though. Not much call for furniture salesmen now. The young people can work at labor jobs, but I don't think it will pay much."
Brenda said, "I meant to tell you last night that Susan called. She said they are both back to work, but their take home pay comes out to around half what it used to be when you get through all the changes to the money and prices of things. She says they can make it okay, but they have to be pretty careful, and they have good jobs. I wonder how the really poor people are going to live?"
"Let's hope they can get by somehow. It's going to be tough." _______________
That night the TV news said elections would be held for all Federal offices this year in November, just like always, except that there would be no incumbents allowed to run. The sitting Supreme Court Justices would not be charged with treason, but they were all to be removed and replaced by the normal appointment process after the new President and Congress were sworn into office. Campaign advertising would to be limited to equal shares of what was donated by television and other media as tax deductible expenses for them.
This year only, there would be 10% flat tax on all personal income above poverty level and profits of businesses under the old tax code to fund the military government. For convenience, income would be reported on form 1040EZ, with no deductions for anything. The Internal Revenue Service would be subject to whatever new tax code was established by the new Congress, the old tax code was to be scrapped entirely. A list of abolished government departments followed, and I couldn't remember them all. It was all supposed to be published in every major newspaper, so I didn't try.
The reporter quoted a statement given by the ruling military Triumvirate to the effect that, "We are giving the United States a second opportunity to have a Constitutional Republic. Some changes to Constitutional amendments will be necessary for that, but that is for the new Congress to establish. We encourage everyone to write to their Congressional representatives, and we encourage them to listen to their constiuents. We hope you get it right this time." _______________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 12:56:47 GMT -6
Chapter 43 September, 2015
I had traded 2 hogs to Stuart Young for 60 bales of nice clean straw and 30 bushels of wheat back when he harvested his crop in July. I still had the hogs, having agreed to feed them out to full slaughter size. Stuart would get them when they were ready to butcher, and hopefully the weather would be cool enough then. They should be close to 300 pounds each by Thanksgiving,instead of 200 to 220 pound size when they were normally marketed. The corn patch we had planted for them was still growing, but showing a lot of stress from the hot, dry weather with rolled up leaves. This was the time when corn needed moisture to fill out the grains on the ears and it wasn't getting it.
Our gardens were still looking good, only because we had been watering individual plants in the evening. That was more efficient than spraying the whole area. Our late crops of spinach, kale, turnips, beets, lima beans, and Great Northern beans were growing, but the beans had lower leaves turning yellow. I thought that was more due to maturity than lack of water, so I told Brittany to stop watering the beans and concentrate on the root crops. There wasn't much left in the irrigation tank.
The yellow summer squash, green beans, and banana peppers were about finished for the year, so we picked the last of them, some cauliflower, and the last of the Brussels sprouts to make a huge kettle of vegetable soup. "End of the Garden Soup", Brenda called it. We had that for supper with the last of the cantaloupe for dessert. I was concerned about the long dry spell and checked the cistern. It showed only 21" of water in it. If we didn't get rain soon, we would be hauling water up from the river to drink and that meant filtering and boiling it to assure it was fit to drink. The pond where all our stock drank was getting pretty low, too.
Grass in the yard had gone dormant, or died, a month ago. I didn't miss mowing it, which I saw as a big waste of time and gasoline, but I would much rather had enough rain to make it grow. I thought we should probably plow up some more of the yard and make it into garden next year. Grass just for something to look at was not important now.
We didn't have all that much lawn. The 3 big garden areas took up most of the back yard, except where it was sloped and that had orchard trees in it, planted years ago. That whole hillside had fruit growing on it bush cherries that had been picked and canned some time ago, a couple gooseberry bushes, two Hazelnut bushes that had just begun to bear this year, 2 plum trees, 2 pears, and 4 large apple trees. The apples had been dropping a lot of green fruit to stay alive in the dry weather, so I had Megan gather them into buckets to feed to the hogs. Hogs will eat almost anything.
There was some unused space around the house because of the steep slopes there that allowed us to have the drive-in basement. I thought maybe we could make some terraces along the front of the house and plant some kind of perennial there, possibly horseradish, rhubarb, herbs, or more strawberries. There wasn't much wasted space around the house now, but we would need to use every inch of it to keep feeding our clan.
The little barn in our back yard that stored the lawn mower and garden tools, plus a fair amount of junk, could probably collect enough water for the chickens, so I thought about how to do that with some rain barrels. The big livestock and hay barn had no gutters either, so the runoff from that was draining across the barnyard and ultimately into the sinkhole in the middle of the pasture. It should be possible to shunt that into a small pond near the barn, if we did it right. That would have to be a project for next summer when there was enough moisture in the ground to do some digging and grading. It would have to be as far as possible from the sinkhole in order to have enough thickness of clay under it to hold water. Maybe if we did that and let the hogs use it, they would pack it bottom and get it to hold water. It was worth a try. We needed more water storage in case we had a bad dry year. _____________________
The TV weathergirl said there was rain coming from a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico that had been causing flooding in the deep South. That was supposed to reach us tonight and rain for a couple days before slowly making its' way on to the northeast. That evening I had Daniel help me clean all the house gutters of dirt and trash, and clean the screens that kept it out of our cistern.
We got rain, lots of it. It came fast enough at first that the gutters overflowed, unable to conduct it fast enough into the cistern. It slowed down then and although the dry ground wasn't able to soak up all of it without a great deal of runoff, the gardens and cornfield were well soaked and muddy. Over the next two days the cistern was back up to 52" of water, over half full. The hot weather broke then, and temperatures fell back from the mid-90's to around 80 degrees. The world greened up as the short pastures grew and corn began to look healthy. Even the air smelled fresh again.
A week later when the corn had greened up nicely, I opened the gate into the cornfield so the hogs could get in to eat it. They were overjoyed and didn't pick their heads up all day. __________________
"Jack, Stephanie called and said they had sold their place!"
I said, "What's up with that?"
"Brad had 2 months notice that the phone company is combining their truck maintenance in Seymour with the shop in Corydon. They bought the old truck dealership at Palmyra for a bigger facility. They are keeping the most senior people, so Brad still has a job, only it's in Palmyra now, not that far from us. Stephie said they sold their place to that old rich guy who buys up all the land he can find. Now they are hunting for something to rent closer to his job."
"There ought to be a lot of places to rent now. Lots of empty houses around here," I said.
"Yeah, they're going to look at a couple places this weekend. But her problem is what to do with their goats. Their neighbor across the road wants to buy the goats for some rough pasture he has, but Stephie's attached to them. I think she was hinting that we might keep them for her until they get a place that has room for them."
"Uh, no. Not just no, HELL NO! I won't have a goat on the place. I know what they do. We don't have fencing that will keep a goat in, and they would destroy our orchard, the gardens, and everything. No. It's not even feasible. We can't afford to lose what they can destroy in one afternoon. We've got enough problems without that."
"She didn't exactly ask me to do that, but it was a broad hint," Brenda said.
"Make me the bad guy then. Tell her like it is, that I won't have 'em on the place, or anywhere close for that matter. I don't want to hurt her feelings, but we can't risk it."
"You may never get any more of her goat cheese."
"I can live with that." _________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 12:58:01 GMT -6
Chapter 44
Josh heard from a customer that the farm across the road from us had been foreclosed by the bank that held the mortgage. The newly changed bankinng regulations required that it be valued at fair market value, or whatever it would bring on the open market. This was intended to put a end to "Zombie Banks" marking their assets at some fantasy price to keep the bank from failing. The property had to be sold within 6 months, or it would be declared worth zero on the bank's financial statement. The effect of that had been to tighten credit severely. Banks simply would not loan anywhere close to full price for real estate now. That in turn, dropped the selling prices for real estate for lack of buyers with a big enough down payment.
This farm had not sold and time was running out, so it was to be sold at absolute auction in a couple months. It was marginal farmland on a hilltop, but also had some good tillable ground on both sides of the hill. The side nearest us had a good pond and was fenced for livestock. The barn was old, but there was a newer 3 bay garage built of concrete blocks that was probably 50 years old, although in pretty good shape. I wondered who might buy it, but figured it would be like others in the neighborhood that had been sold to an investor group that arranged for tenants to do the farming.
There were two dwellings on the property, the original stone farmhouse and a fairly new doublewide modular home. The modular home had belonged to the son of the original owner and had its' own garage, a 3 bay pole building tall enough for the son to use for maintaining the semi truck he owned. When the original owner had passed away, the son's trucking business came to an end with the crash of the economy, then bankruptcy ensued. The property had been vacant since last winter and was grown up in weeds. Equipment, probably repossessed by the same bank, had been sitting in the weeds for some time.
I was surprised to learn that the property reached as far as the river below and was said to be "120 acres, more or less", on the realty sign in the yard. No matter to me, since we had no money to invest, so I forgot about it. ________________
Susan and Art came to visit one Sunday afternoon and had noticed the sign as they drove past it.
"Dad, what's up with the farm across the road?"
"It's been foreclosed so the bank has to sell it," I told her. "New bank regulations," I added.
Art's ears perked up and he asked, "What's it worth?"
"It's worth whatever they can get for it now. The new Congress is hell bent on making bankers honest and real estate prices realistic again, according to what the news said. 'Cleaning out the barn' they called the new policies and regulations."
"There will be some big losers from that," Susan said.
Art said, "It sounds like there will be some big opportunites, too. We have been looking for a way to invest our retirement savings. We saved most of what we had from the devaluations by dumping our accounts ahead of the dollar crisis and buying gold. That has appreciated now, but we need to get some earnings from it if we can. Our jobs are just keeping our heads above water for now."
Susan said, "I will never, ever invest in stocks and bonds again as long as I live. I'd buy a farm in a heartbeat, but we still have to work because it would take too long for a farm to produce an income."
Brenda said, "You need to talk to your brother. His job just got moved from Seymour to Palmyra. They sold their place and are moving into a rental next week just down the road south of us."
Art looked at Susan who asked her mother, "Can I use your phone?" ___________________
It was a busy month for Brad, Stephanie, Susan, and Art, but by then the farm had been bought by the two couples after forming an LLC to facilitate the process. It sold cheap enough, but it took all the two couples could scrape together to have enough for the needed repairs on the place and equipment and have enough left for operating money for the next year. Howard was an excellent business administrator, so he was drafted to keep track of finances. He had saved his business computer and set up records for the LLC.
Josh and I put a lot of hours into fixing farm equipment, assisted by Tammy and Daniel. The labor required to get the old place in shape for the next season was immense. A plan evolved that made some sense. Susan and Art had no desire to move to the farm because it was too far from their jobs. They would be silent partners in the venture. Brad and Stephanie would move in as soon as possible, after some minimal repair work on the farmhouse. Daniel and Heather would move into the modular home, and work for the LLC as employees, taking advantage of Daniel's broad experience in business and construction.
Most importantly to Stephanie, she got to buy back her goats and get them ensconced in the old barn before bad weather. She hoped the fencing was adequate to keep them at home. They borrowed our stock trailer, towed by Josh's truck to move the goats and haul what feed they had to the new place. Pandemonium reigned for a couple months in our respective households.
Brad struck a deal with Stuart Young to do grain harvesting for the coming season, while Josh and Daniel concentrated on getting the tractor, plows, disk, planter and grain drill in shape to use. There was still time to plant some winter wheat, but their equipment wasn't ready so I used our tractor to do the tillage while the young men did repairs on their grain drill. As soon as I had twenty acres in the river bottom ready to plant, I mowed the 30-odd acres of pasture and hay ground to get the weeds out of the way for next spring. My supply of diesel fuel was getting lower than I liked, but the new government had cut fuel taxes for agriculture, so the LLC bought my fuel somewhat cheaper than we had expected. I made enough for my work to put 2 badly needed front tires on our old tractor and do the maintenance it needed. I got paid a bit more for fixing some parts for the grain drill.
October 10th was the accepted date to plant winter wheat in our community, but we were almost a week late getting it finished. That was acceptable, and the Fall rains cooperated. Brad worked on equipment evenings after his day job and Stephanie had the goat dairy going again turning out cheese to age, while Josh wrenched on other equipment and Daniel did building repairs.
Meanwhile, Ryan, Megan, Kevin and Brittany were cuttng firewood from last year's treetops for everyone. Brenda and Charlene were keeping all of us at our house all fed and clothed. Hailey was up and walking well now, in case the older women needed something to keep them busy. She had discovered a litter of kittens in our barn, and was always wanting to go play with them, so someone had to assure she didn't wander off while Tammy was getting greasy with Josh in the shop.
Stephanie had managed to raise quite a garden this year and had moved her canned goods into their new place. She wanted some chickens, but that got put off so farm work could be accomplished in a timely manner. She did get her wood cook stove installed by threatening to offer nothing but cold meals until it happened. Their farm had a well that supplied the household needs of the two houses. It was an ancient hand dug well, laid up with stone and over 40 feet deep, complete with a hand pump on top in case the electric one wasn't functional for some reason, like during the ongoing power outages. Daniel and Heather had already been living with our hand pump, so they adapted quickly.
Brad drove their big IH tractor out of the shop after they had finished with it and headed for the river bottom fields. It took less adjusting than he had expected so he got a decent start before dark that night. He wanted it all plowed for corn this Fall, if possible, because he knew the bottom fields would the last ones to dry out in the Spring. _____________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 12:59:08 GMT -6
Chapter 45 March, 2016
The winter had gone pretty well, all things considered. We had sold our cattle and hogs and had some cash on hand. Julie had dropped her foal on a warm morning the middle of March and it looked at least as good as her last two. Only nursing the one, he grew pretty fast.
Hailey had a really high fever once, but some aspirin and ordinary nursing got it back down by evening. She was sniffling the next day, but up and going again. Little kids bounce back fast. Insurance for us poor people was a thing of the past now, so going to a doctor was reserved for desperate cases. I had heard that only a few insurance companies survived the crash.
The lack of affordable health care meant that a lot of people died that might not have with decent care. One of the places that went out of business was the more expensive funeral home in town. Nobody could afford to pay for funerals, but the law said they had to be buried properly and that bankrupted a lot of poor families. The County was left to pay for the burial of indigents, and that cut deep into the County budget, leaving almost nothing for other things. The County road department was down to one man now and all he got done was patch a few potholes with gravel. They couldn't afford asphalt cold patching.
Indiana still required vehicle insurance, but nobody I knew had anything except liability coverage and that was expensive. We decided to drop the license and insurance on my wife's truck at the first of the year and just cover mine. We didn't drive unless we had to, and my old truck cost less for the license. Hers was parked in the machinery shed in case mine crapped out.
The property insurance had gotten very expensive, so after some debates, we decided to just drop it. If something burned down, that would be bad, but we simply could not afford the insurance. Other things came first. I put some effort into checking all the electrical stuff in the house and outbuildings to make sure we didn't have a fire hazard waiting there and replaced some switches and light sockets. Except for the shop needs, we would have shut off the electrical service, too, but it cost more to run the generator to power the shop. I had to up my charges a little to cover that, and it meant some people couldn't afford to get things fixed. _______________________
Howard got a call from an acquaintance in Louisville who owned property next to his old furniture store. A developer was trying to buy that entire city block, and the man wanted to know if Howard was planning to sell to him. They discussed prices and determined what their bottom price would be to sell. Howard was pleased to learn that his property was now prime real estate and sold out, as-is, for $3,400. That amount of money in the new currency was enough to buy a very fine home, or about 15 nice new cars.
Charlene didn't feel well at the time, but went along to sign the papers at the closing. Howard said he was coming down with a bad case of the sniffles himself, and only got the check cashed then stopped at the emergency care clinic on his way home and got some medications. They both had a bad case of the flu that was going around, and spent the next week getting more sick instead of better. We took them both to the hospital and stayed until they were settled into the same room. Two days later they had both passed away from an extreme fever.
Charlene and Howard were just two of the hundreds in our county that died from that virulent strain of flu. Their kids agreed to have them cremated, as had been reccomended to help stop the epidemic that was raging. We lost some neighbors and several acquaintances before it was over. Fortunately, none of the rest of the family was affected beyond some fever, aches, and normal flu symptoms. Still, it was after the first of the year before we all began to think we had recuperated.
After paying for the funeral and other expenses, Daniel, Ryan, and Brittany each inherited $1,000 in cash from their parents. Daniel and Heather immediately talked to Susan, Art, Brad and Stephanie about buying the home they were living in. That deal went through fast, in order to get it finished before the end of the year for farm tax purposes. They got an acre lot that included the pole building shop and a driveway easement to the highway for $350 and had enough cash on hand left to live for a year. Daniel's job for the LLC did not change, so they lived where he worked. They decided to buy a small used pickup truck in good running condition for $48.
When Howard and Charlene's household goods were distributed among their heirs, our house began to seem more like normal again. Only Josh, Tammy, and Hailey remained living with us. __________________
The heirs owned the furniture delivery truck jointly, and agreed to give it to Brenda and me in gratitude for living with us. I thanked them after they refused to take any payment for it, and pondered what to do with it. It had not been used in the 8 months they had been with us. The batteries were low, but it started after some charging. I had some ideas and talked it over with Brenda, then went to talk to Ryan and Kevin and their wives.
"The farm is really more than I can do alone and you all know it," I said. "I have a deal to propose. There is a market for fresh vegetables here, now that shipping them across the country is so expensive. Only a few people had anything to sell at the farmer's market in town last year, so how about we get out of the hog business and plow up that better ground next to David and Carmen's here? The local groceries will undoubtedly buy some, and we can set up a roadside stand, too. That truck started out as a refrigerated van, and it still works just fine. We can remove that reefer box from it and use it to store vegetables. It will run several days on a gallon of diesel. Anybody interested?"
David said, "I'm interested, if nobody else is. Driving the bus this year barely kept us going after they cut the pay for it. But that much gardening is more than Carmen and I can do. It would take all of us to make it work."
The young people discussed it and liked the idea. There was a lot to work out. We had to do some research on getting plants for the first year, decide what would be a fair rental for the ground from me, and for doing the tractor work. I offered to manure the ground and do the tillage, but I'd have to come up with a cultivator. The discussion went on late that evening, but we had a plan roughed out. _________________
Josh and I used some planks and the tractor to slide the reefer box off the truck, then lowered it to the ground with hydraulic jacks and wood blocks a little at a time. We got it levelled up on some timbers and called it a good job. We'd placed it in the shade of a big maple tree behind David's house, where it would be convenient to both the field and to the roadside where we would put a stand for sales.
Josh said, "We'll need to put a battery on this thing to start it now that it's not hooked to the truck battery. Same with the fuel."
I told him, "I planned to just jump start it from whatever car or truck. Leave the battery cables hanging. I've got a 5 gallon fuel can we can put on on the cooler mounting. Need to keep that fuel line full so it won't be such a pain to start next time. It's a kinda redneck way to do it, but it's the cheapest I can think of. Don't have to have its' own battery."
We messed around a while getting those things done, but the little engine fired right up.
"Let's let it run a while and see if it cools down like it should," I said.
Josh nodded and began to pick up tools and leftovers from the job. "Put these long planks back in the shed?"
"Yeah. We need to keep 'em dry so they don't rot."
We let it run for an hour and the box got very cold inside. No problem. We'd have to set the thermostat higher or we'd freeze the produce. In the shade we shouldn't have to run the cooler very much.
Next we used the remainder of the sawed lumber stacked in the machinery shed to build a flat bed for the truck. There were some leftovers of steel pipe laying around the shop that we used to build a "headache rack" just behind the cab. The rough sawn oak lumber wasn't beautiful, but it was very strong. We used up what bolts I had building this much. I still had some paint, so we put a couple coats of black oil based enamel on the bed, the first coat liberally diluted with linseed oil to make it soak in deep.
Josh said, "It would look better if we got the old store name off the cab doors."
"You want to sand it down? I've still got some white spray paint."
"I'll sand it down, but I'm not much of a painter," he said.
"I'm not either, but this thing is going to live on the farm and the animals won't care if it has some runs in the paint," I told him. "I'd rather it didn't rust out, though."
Josh grinned and said, "Maybe I can do it good enough."
"If we could find time and materials to build a grain box for the truck with stock racks on top, that would make it a lot more useful, but for now if we just make some sideboards a couple feet high, it would be good. Then we could haul a little crushed stone to patch driveways and such things."
"Yeah, we've got enough to do that I think," Josh said.
Hauling stone and other things for our use would save us enough to offset the cost of license and insurance, but I put off licensing the truck until we had a need to use it. Even farm truck license cost a lot. Sometimes you are just too poor to save a lot of money by spending a little.
Meanwhile, it could stay in the machinery building out of the weather. With good white paint on the cab and the rest of it black, the old truck looked pretty good when we finished, and it didn't have many miles on it. I figured it would be useful for hauling hay for sale and whatever else came up in the course of farming our place and the kids' farm across the road. I even had a tarp that would fit it, left over from the military surplus tarp deal. It would have to be good paying work if we used it, though, because the truck's crappy fuel mileage would cost us a fortune to drive it with on-road diesel at 42 cents a gallon. I had an old solar battery charger I hooked to the truck to help keep it from going flat, and I parked it on some short planks to keep the tires off the damp dirt floor and help preserve them. __________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 13:02:30 GMT -6
Chapter 46 April, 2016
Megan said, "Ryan, I've never had this much money. A thousand dollars now is like a hundred thousand before. I don't know what to do with it. I'm afraid we'll just spend it and not have anything left. People who won the lottery did that and a year later they were broke."
"Yeah. I don't ever wanna be broke again. We could buy a house, but I don't have a job. I've gotta get a good job before we buy a house. Or maybe start a business, but then we wouldn't have enough to buy a house."
"We can't live here with your Aunt Carmen forever. We have to do something besides garden for them," Megan said.
"I think we can make money with the garden, but we need something of our own," Ryan said. "Like Daniel did buying down there with Brad and Stephanie. But he already had a job there. The job is the problem. It has to come first. Y'know Kevin said him and Brittany had this talk not long ago."
"She didn't say anything to me about it. Have they decided what to do yet?"
"Nah. He just said they were kickin' it around. He thinks he wants to do blacksmith work. He helped Jack do some work in hhis shop and it sounds like he fell in love. He's always hangin' around Jack now, and he found an old forge in the barn over there. Jack said he could have it if he wants it, and he's pretty stoked about that."
"Can he work at that? I mean is there anybody needs a blacksmith now? I thought that went out with buggy whips," Megan said.
"Yeah, but Jack was showing him how to make stuff that way. Jack uses his forge some, to make things, and he told Kevin he could make some money at it. Heck, he made a poker and a shovel for Carmen's wood stove and it didn't take him long. Lots of wood stoves around now."
"What can we do, though?"
Ryan said, "I used to do some fix up on furniture floor samples and old stuff when Dad ran a deal for trade ins. He sold the old stuff to that guy who ran a flea market. I fixed up the loose legs and glued joints and fixed drawer slides. I got pretty good at patching the scratches in finishes, too."
"Nobody's buying new furniture now."
"That's right. They buy old stuff instead, and most of it looks like junk. I bet there's some money to be made fixing up junk furniture and selling it."
Megan said, "Heck I can do some of that. I always liked to help my Dad doing woodworking. I guess I never told you that."
Ryan was thinking ahead and said, "We need to buy a pickup truck. Something that runs cheap. Then we can look for some junk to try this. There's an empty shed out back that I bet Jack would let us use." ______________________
I heard a car hit the "drunk bumps", I called them, on the shoulder of the highway out front. It was supposed to wake up a sleepy driver and keep them from running off the road. By our house, it meant the mail had come. I remembered it was Monday. We only got mail on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after the cutbacks at the Post Office. I left the garage to get it while Josh was putting brakes on a pickup truck. There was less junk mail now. I supposed they couldn't afford to advertise as much. The small town paper was there, so I went to the kitchen and sat down to glance through it.
In the real estate ads was a picture that looked familiar. I read the ad and sure enough, it was located just off the highway on the next county road to the south of us, about a 1/4 mile from David and Carmen's place. I didn't know the folks who lived there, so the description surprised me that there was a total of 22 acres, all but 5 of it in woods. It had a small barn, no bigger than a 2 car garage, but it had a hay loft. I had seen a couple riding horses there until recently. The house was 1 1/2 stories, probably with those sloped ceilings in upstairs bedrooms. There was what I called a Model A Ford garage, the tiny old style with vertical board siding built back when cars were smaller. The whole place looked like it had been built in the 1930's, except for a pole frame hay barn in the pasture uphill from the pond.
I mentioned it to Brenda and showed her the picture while I cooled off with a glass of iced tea.
She said, "Brittany said they wanted to buy a place, and Ryan and Megan have been talking about it, too. I'll show this to them, because it's so close, and it looks like it might be affordable."
"Kevin said they wanted ot buy a place, but they were afraid to without having a better income."
"Yeah, Megan said something like that, too. I know they hate to live with Carmen and David."
I said, "Maybe one of them will be interested. Looks like a good place to me."
Brenda said, "What are you doing this afternoon?"
"I need to harness a horse and go cultivate the truck patch down at David's today, but I'll wait until it cools down a little later on. I've been giving Josh a hand on that brake job. He'll need me to step on the pedal while he bleeds the brake lines soon. It needed a couple new lines and they are all full of air. I better go see him."
Julie had been loafing for a while, so I used her to cultivate the truck patch and she seemed to enjoy it. I had taken the paper with me and gave it to Brittany with the ad marked about the house. ________________
It was a month later when Ryan and Megan, Brittany and Kevin all jointly made an offer on the property. The two couples thought a lot alike, having all been through the same experiences. They had decided they could each afford half of the property and still have enough left to buy some kind of transportation and make repairs as needed. That would leave them with a comfortable level of savings.
The property was empty, having been foreclosed, and somewhat overgrown with old tall grass and weeds, so I took the tractor and mower over and clipped the pasture. While I was mowing I noticed that there were at least two other properties on down that road. We didn't drive around much now, so that was news to me.
It looked like the next neighbors might be Ted Hamilton and his wife, an old couple who had their farm rented to Stuart Young. Next would be Bill Woodruff who had the dairy farm some distance away. I couldn't help but wonder what had happened to the 5 or 6 families that used to live in the other empty homes back there. Probably the flu got some and foreclosures got the rest. A lot of families had their kids move back home these days, or the other way around, depending on who had an income. Stuart had a good corn crop growing in the fields across the road, but I could see over it to the Hamilton's house on the hill where a lush garden was growing. Stuart had told me the Hamiton's kids had moved in with them and were helping take care of the old folks. _________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 13:03:25 GMT -6
Chapter 47 June 2016
Josh had finished the brake job and other repairs a month ago , but the truck was still sitting at our place. The owner had lost his job and couldn't afford to pay for the work. Josh wanted his money and told the man they had to work something out soon. The owner said he'd have to sell it to Josh, because he had no way to pay him.
When the deal was settled Ryan bought the truck cheap, Josh got his money, and the owner got some cash left over. It was a full size half ton Ford with a small six cylinder engine and in pretty good shape now. It needed some tires on the back, but Josh had a pair of used ones he'd taken in trade, so they worked that out. The two couples spent the next two weeks getting moved in. We gave them a housewarming present of some spare canning jars, some of them full of our older stock, and an old but serviceable chainsaw I 'd had around for ages. They had their parents' kitchenwares and bedroom furniture and the house came with a really old metal dinette table and chairs. David gave them an old couch and some end tables and they were moved in.
The paper always had auction ads, mostly household goods. The two women went to auctions while their husbands were working the produce stand and tending the truck patch at David's. The women decided quickly that Brittany and Kevin should buy a small cheap car that got better fuel economy than the truck. They found one in a few days and had Josh give it a going-over.
Their driveway was nearly bare of gravel, so Kevin and Ryan offered to pay for me to license and insure my old truck if I'd use it to haul them some crushed stone. Unfortunately, the old furniture truck did not have a dump bed, so the stone had to be shoveled off, but the tractor and loader helped with that. I worked at it off and on for a week and got the driveway in good shape, then extended it to the pole building to use for a garage. It had a rough concrete floor and was in fair shape, although it was showing some rust. The women attended to painting the building and the men covered half of the open side with metal siding to create some dry storage space. While they were doing that, I hauled some stone for our driveway at our house and added some around the farm buildings in the bad spots.
The women continued to go to auctions and furnished the house pretty well. Megan had torn into an old closet and pantry and removed a thin dividing wall. She bought some shelving units at a sale and Brittany had the pantry organized soon after, then got busy with wall papering most of the house. There was only one small bathroom, but an old outhouse had survived and it was agood one with a concrete floor and good tongue and groove siding. Brittany wall papered inside that, too.
I went over to help one Sunday when Ryan and Kevin finally got time to tackle cleaning out the other buildings, and there was a lot of junk to be disposed of. I went over to help with that and helped them evaluate what they found. There was a lot of useful stuff, but none of it in useable condition.
"We need to load all this stuff in the truck and go to the junk yard," Kevin said.
I said, "You can fix a lot of this and save buying it new."
Kevin looked at me and said, "How can you save a busted shovel, or that rusty bucket?"
"The shovel just needs the rust rubbed off and a handle. You can cut a handle in the woods back there. You can soak the bucket in vinegar and get the rust out then give it a coat of paint. Not everything here is worth saving, but some of it is."
Ryan said, "Why not? You want to pick out what you think we can save? Then we'll load up the rest."
I agreed and we all got busy. I had a pretty good pile of hand tools, an old log chain with no hooks, 3 buckets, some rusty pipe, a roll of chicken wire, another of rusty but usable barbed wire, a hoe, some cans of bolts and screws, a can of old grease, some fence staples in a glass jar, an axe with a broken handle and 2 splitting wedges so far.
The boys had a pretty good pile of trash to burn, old cardboard, some worn out linoleum, a rotten chair, and paper trash. The truck had rusted stove pipe, old tin cans, dead paint brushes, a bucket of odd rusty machinery parts, and the old dinette table and chairs. Brittany had found a very nice dining table and 4 chairs at an auction cheap, so they were upgrading.
They drug out an old carpet and more cardboard boxes that had hidden everything beyond them. A white porcelain box shape showed under more trash. Once we got the heavy monster outside, I read, "Home Comfort" on the front. It was a wood cook stove. It was heavy. Behind that was a metal stand with a pair of galvanized wash tubs and a hand cranked clothes wringer. The wringer had a wooden frame and it was rotten. The wringers were warped and split, so it went to the burn pile.
More boxes of old newspapers and cast off clothing came out, and Brittany got into the act. She was oohing and aahing over the cook stove outside. She said it was a keeper. The young men carried out a wood box on a stand with a rusty cast iron thing bolted to the top and asked what it was.
"That's a hand crank corn sheller, and you'd better keep that, especially if you plan to get any chickens," I said.
Megan stuck her nose inside and exclaimed, "I want that!"
Kevin said, "What?"
"That wringer washing machine!"
It was sitting in the back corner and just showing under more trash. We moved more junk and got it outside. The small caster wheels were rusted and stuck, but the machine looked pretty good. It had a small gasoline engine on the bottom that was undoubtedly toast, from appearances.
"I have a good Honda 2 horse engine that would fit on that," I said.
Megan said, "You've got the job to fix it. I've used Brenda's old Maytag and it is SO much faster than an automatic that I would never have one again. It gets the clothes so much cleaner, too."
Brittany agreed and the guys just stared at the women, but they obediently carried the thing outside and put it in my truck. I loaded up the corn sheller, too. The men took my pile of saved items out to store in the barn for now and finished loading Ryan's truck with scrap metal. We all carried the items to be burned out to what had obviously been a garden spot and set it on fire. They had no electricity in the house yet, so we used the hand pump on the well and filled a couple buckets in case the fire wanted to spread, but it wasn't a problem.
They did have the LP gas stove hooked up, but everyone had griped about what it cost to get 2 tanks of gas. The group decided that the wood cook stove was fine idea, so it was thoroughy cleaned to get the ashes and old mouse nests out if it. It took all 4 of the young people to move it back into the house to what was clearly its' old spot by the chimney, defined by the tracks of its' legs in the oak flooring. The women would go to town the next day and sell the metal scrap, and get some stovepipe. The men were told to cut some dry wood ASAP. Cleaning out the barn would have to wait for another day. _______________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 13:04:46 GMT -6
Chapter 48 The barn was relatively clean, compared to the rest of the place. The last residents had been horse lovers, judging by what we found in there. We found ots of worn out horse shoes were thrown about in one stall and we found a pair of hoof nippers, rusted solid and hanging over a stall partition. Kevin had in mind to set up a blacksmith shop in the old garage we had cleaned out, so he was delighted to find an anvil in the barn. There were no tools, not even a hammer, but the anvil was a prize. I guessed that it weighed 150 pounds or more, and was in pretty good shape. There were a few chips on the edges and dings in the horn, but nothing we couldn't grind or file away. "Now all I need is a forge," he said. I said, "We can make you a forge. I've got an old brake drum from a truck Josh worked on and there is a spare blower and a leg vise in my shed. If we get that much together and find you a hammer or two, you can make the rest." www.ebay.com/bhp/post-leg-vise The Vise www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to-plans/metalworking/4303543 Forge from a sink www.stormthecastle.com/blacksmithing/how-to-make-an-easy-cheap-blacksmith-forge.htm Forge form a brake drum www.oldfirestuff.com/misc/RoyalChiefcastironblacksmithhandcrankforgeblower.htm Cranked forge blower www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9fGUCmn5Hs Forging a drawknife "I think there's a couple old hammers in your machine shed, or maybe I saw 'em in one of the small buildings. No handles, though." "You make yourself a drawknife with my forge and you can shave out some handles. There's some good hickory in my woodpile you can split out for handle blanks." "You'll have to show me how to make a drawknife." "I'll show you mine and give you that big old file I've been saving and you can figure out how to make it." Kevin spent a lot of his spare time at my shop for a while getting some tools together and made most of them. Meanwhile, Ryan and Megan had collected a couple truckloads of old furniture and had them in the enclosed part of the pole building. They invested in some wood scrapers, sandpaper, steel wool, and cans of finish materials and worked on the pieces as they had time. They didn't buy anything that wasn't old, solid hardwood construction and only the best deals they could find. As exceptionally good pieces were finished, they got put in the house for use and display. Soon they had more that had to stay in the pole building, and put an ad in the newspaper. Money began to trickle in. They had almost given up on having a garden on their place the first year, but I got it plowed and disked for them, so they planted it all. The vegetable stand at David and Carmen's place was doing a good business, and they had sold some quantities of things to a grocery in town, so that operation was making some real money. It wasn't nearly so much when it got divided up 3 ways among the families, though. The young folks put up some chicken wire to enclose a stall in the barn and we gave them 4 of our old hens. They got by with a couple old pans for feed and water and some homemade wood boxes nailed to the wall for nests. The barn loft had a few bales of musty hay in it that they used for litter. The men helped me get a couple heavy jobs done in my shop and I paid them with ground corn and oats for their chickens. They had spent almost nothing to get that going. The hens got garden scraps and any food scraps from the kitchen, so they ate pretty well. The chicken feed attracted mice, so we gave them a young cat from our Kitty's last litter. They kept her in the house for a few days and then let her out on a weekend the first time. She had already decided she lived there and took up residence in the barn with the hens for company, but always showed up for breakfast and supper. _____________________ Kevin had his blacksmith shop operating, after buying a couple barrels of hard coal from a place in Palmyra, 12 miles away. He'd run a heavy 8" pipe out the roof and made a hood for the homemade forge out of old sheet metal he scrounged from a rotten shed they tore down. It wasn't perfect, but most of the smoke went out the roof. He'd already begun to watch for any useful scraps of metal for forging material and had a small collection. ______________ David learned that he had a job driving a bus in the Fall, but the pay was no better. His internet business selling used books had dried up to nearly nothing, so he was looking to supplement his income after the last of the garden produce was finished with a crop of pumpkins and winter squash. The vegetable sales had done pretty well in the summer, but it was just enough to keep the family going, so he was looking for any other income opportunity he could find. _________________ Winter would come eventually, and the young people's old house had no heating except the cook stove. Ryan and Kevin decided to pay me to build them a wood heating stove. I used my last sheet of 3/16" steel to build it, a copy of an old commercial design, but more durable with the heavy material. The young men cut trees and let them lay to dry out, then cut some dead ones for immediate use. Their woodpile began to grow slowly. The women had lived without electricity long enough that they decided to do without it. They did buy one big solar panel, a couple deep cycle batteries, a 12 volt television and some LED lights. That was enough. They all were ready for bed soon after dark anyway. _____________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 14:21:22 GMT -6
Chapter 49 June, 2016 Julie's two colts had grown to yearlings and were both looking good after shedding off their winter coats. They had the pasture to themselves for now. I was looking for a deal on more feeder calves, but prices were high. The truck patch garden we had going over by David and Carmen's place had begun to produce some early peppers, tomatoes, and salad stuff. The roadside stand had some business, and a half acre of new strawberry plants were growing like mad, setting on a few berries. It would be next year before the berries produced much, but we would have a few to sell soon. Brenda answered the phone and said, "It's for you." "Hello, this is Jack Hesston." "You're the man who got Eugene Hesston's Percheron mare?" "That's right." "You ought to have a yearling out of her by now, right?" "That's right, but she had twins, a mare and a stud colt." "No kidding! Hey! That's great! Those are out of my stud, and I was wondering if you'd sell, well both of them?" "I hadn't thought about it. I was going to work 'em. We've got a little poor farm here and can use 'em." "That pair is worth more to breed, you know. I'd pay what they're worth for the good bloodlines." "I have no idea what they're worth. I was never involved in breeding horses of any kind. Tell me what you think." "Hmm. Well, if they're sound and good conformation like I'd expect, they should be worth quite a bit." "Eugene's son told me that Julie, the mare, was worth over $60,000 when he had her. That was the old money, of course." "I might buy her, too, if you're willing to sell." "No, I promised the family I would keep her. It was important to Eugene." "But the colts now, you'd sell them?" "Yes, if the price is right. You want to make an offer?" "I'd have to see 'em first, but yeah, I'll make an offer, and I'll bring cash money." ________________ Long story short, when I kept talking about working the horses, he said he had an unregistered pair that were 7 years old and broke to work. Both were Percheron mares, but being grade horses they had little value as breeding stock. We made a trade. I got the working team with their harness and he paid me $800 difference. I had a hard time believing how much the yearlings were worth, which he had taken as me being reluctant to sell for the price. My ignorance got him to raise his bid from $500 up to $800. We unloaded the team he'd brought to trade, and with some difficulty we loaded the pair in his trailer and off they went. Maybe the best news of the day came when the buyer inquired about the foal with Julie. I told him it was out of a Amish stud and he asked to see the papers. That stud was a full brother to his, a couple years older. He said if I wanted to sell this foal next year to give him a call. I was delighted to hear that. I filed the registration papers. Julie was bummed, big time, from her last colts leaving, but she had the new one to console her. She was still out of sorts and cranky, but she calmed down after a couple days. It took longer for the new team to sort out that Julie was, and would always be the boss horse. Once they had that settled, they got along good and we had a working team. They might even work three abreast, If I was that ambitious. The $800 was taxable income, so I needed to have some farm expenses to offset that this year. I bought cattle. From a breeder near Seymour, I paid $350 for 10 purebred Angus bred heifers. They were due to calve next March. They had been bred to a high quality bull by the artifical breeder's service and had the papers and ear tattoos to prove it. It took 2 trips to get them home, but they looked good on the summer pasture and we had enough money ahead now to not be so worried about it. ________________ The two new mares took some time to get used to me and be convinced I wouldn't tolerate horseplay while they worked. I dragged in some downed logs for firewood using them as a team and got the rough edges off their behavior. One at a time, they worked nicely to cultivate the truck patch. Lester's old one horse cultivator proved was more controllable than any tractor implement I had ever used. It saved days of back breaking tilling and hoeing. When everyone saw how easy it went, there was a lot of talk about expanding the project the next year. It had taken David a whole day to run through the 2 acres of garden with his rototiller. I did a deeper and more effective job of cultivating it in less than 2 hours from the time I left the barn with the horse until she was back in the pasture. A big horse walks fairly fast. We did our home gardens that way, too, and when Daniel and Brad saw how fast it went, we did their gardens, too. ______________________ Can your tiller keep up with him? Cultivating with Ozzie: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzBf_iF7CKI
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 14:23:09 GMT -6
Chapter 50 July, 2016
I had kept the old sows and the boar and planned at least one more litter from them, probably to sell as feeder pigs. We had some corn left in the grain bin and it was getting old and little buggy, so I couldn't get much by selling it. Better to feed it, I thought.
I had cleaned the barn and spread the manure heavily on the corn ground, so this Spring I had disked it up and sowed it in oats. I planned to have Stuart combine the grain and then bale the straw myself for our own use. Stephanie had spoke for some straw for litter in their dairy barn. The 3 acre field of oats was looking good, a deep rich green. It should be ready to harvest by the end of the month. Such a small patch was hardly worth the trouble to change settings in Stuart's combine, but he wanted some to feed some chickens, so he'd agreed to harvest it for a share.
Taking a look at the pond on my way back from the oat field, I saw the charcoal gray back of what must be a big catfish curl up and then down again in the shallows. It was time to get a better look at what fish we had in that pond. It was already a sultry hot July morning and a bit cloudy so we might be in for a shower of rain this afternoon. I had an idea and headed for the shop to find Josh.
"Want to do a little fishing?"
Josh looked up from sweeping up the garage and said, "It's too hot for 'em to be bitin', ain't it?"
I said, "I'm not planning to hook 'em. I plan to seine the pond and see what's in there. I just saw a monster catfish, or the back of one anyway."
"Seines are illegal. You can't even buy a seine in Indiana."
"That's for public places, the best I know. I could fish my own pond with a backhoe if I wanted to."
"Where you gonna get the net?"
"I thought we could try using chicken netting. There's a roll of it in the shed that's 5 feet high. I figure we put a 2 by 4 on each end and walk it across the pond. You game to try that?"
"Why not!? It's plenty warm to be gettin' wet."
"Okay. You find that chicken wire and I'll go get some more help. We'll need a barrel to put 'em in and the women on the dip nets. I'll see if I can talk 'em into it." _______________________
By lunch time we had a barrel half full of fish and had thrown that many very small panfish over the bank to reduce the competition. I hauled the barrel to the house in the back of my little pickup and added some fresh water to keep the fish alive until we were ready for them. We missed that lunker catfish, but we had 4 or 5 very good ones that would go 8 or 10 pounds each.
I guess we didn't have enough scrap iron on the chicken wire net to take it all the way to the bottom where those big boys hung out. Or, maybe he snuck away when we got tangled in the cattails. We did get enough to keep all of us busy cleaning fish for the rest of the day and enough filets and catfish steaks to fill some empty space in the freezer. The gut bucket got dumped on the compost pile. I was given instructions to make sure I buried it deep, which I did, but not before all the cats on the farm had run off with their share.
Josh and I did our best to get the mud and fishy smell off at the laundry sink in the basement. The women wouldn't have any room to gripe about how we smelled, though, since they had been up to their elbows in fish all afternoon, too.
The sky began to get pretty dark about 4:00 o'clock with a big thunderhead cloud coming from the southwest. The closer it got, the worse it looked. The wind began to blow pretty hard so I went in to check the TV for storm warnings. The weather radio crackled then. Josh and I heard the computerized voice said we were under a tornado watch until 7:00 PM. I ran upstairs to tell Brenda and Tammy. They had seen it on TV and were busy closing up the house.
"You know the drill," I said. "I'm going to put the horses up. See you in the basement."
Sonny came with me and together we managed to get the cows all in the barn, too, but it took a few minutes. The sky was a little greenish under the thundercloud by then and the wind had stopped. For a couple of old dogs, me and Sonny made pretty good time getting to the basement. We got he garage door closed and bolted just as the wind was picking up. and the lights went out.
I was still catching my breath when Brenda said, "I called Stephie and Carmen. They were all running for their cellars, so they are okay."
"Good. Hope it doesn't amount to anything," I said.
Hailey put up a squall when the wind began to howl outside and the garage door rattled. I used my pocket flashlight to find the 12 volt lantern we kept down there and got some light going. Tammy held her and got the little girl calmed down, saying, "It's just the wind Hailey. Don't worry about it." Hailey was almost 2 1/2 years old now, and begnning to listen to her mother.
We all heard the roaring, sort of like a train up close, only this was coming from some distance south of us. There was no way to tell what direction it was going, toward us, away, or going past. It was an unearthly sound, with loud cracks almost lost in the overwhelming roar, mixed with unidentifiable sounds amid rain hitting the garage door like a fire hose. It seemed like an hour, but in a few minutes the din had died down to a distant rumble. The rain slacked off as quick as it came, but there was a puddle where it had blown under the door. The downpour continued for a few minutes, but it was coming more or less straight down.
Half an hour later, the sun was out again. The heat of the day was gone, but the humidity remained when I ventured outside. Josh had gotten the covers over the solar panels and shut up the chicken house. There were green leaves and twigs all over the yard and driveway, but I couldn't see any harm done, beyond some plants laying a bit sideways in the garden and a few small limbs blown off our shade trees. We all walked around the house to the top of the hill and to look at the neighborhood to the south.
Our barn was fine and there didn't appear to be any real damage at Carmen and David's place, except a big limb broken off and laying in their driveway. Across the county road beyond them, the soybeans were flattened halfway across Stuart's field. The rest of the field to the south was bare. The soybeans were just--gone. Likewise the old empty house across the highway from that field. It no longer existed. A foundation and some tattered bits of metal and brick were strewn around that lot. The trees on the far side of that lot were decorated with shreds of metal roofing, tar paper, and broken pieces of lumber. A styrofoam cooler sat in the middle of the highway near some unrecognizable trash.
We went inside, silently giving thanks we had been spared. The path of the tornado looked to be at least a quarter mile south of Ryan and Kevin's place, but we wanted to know what was going on there. I grabbed my chain saw, the fuel can, and it's tool can and tossed it in the back of Josh's truck with a couple log chains, a long pry bar and an axe. Brenda I got in the bed with the tools and the rest of them all piled into the cab. Josh drove slowly down to Carmen and David's and stopped at the end of the driveway. They came outside and helped as we began to cut up the limb blocking it. In a few minutes it was clear enough for them to get through.
"Glad you all are okay," I said. "We need to go check on the young folks, so we'd better run." _______________
No damage was evident as we drove up to the farmhouse, but there were leaves and forest duff scattered everywhere. Brittany came out followed by Megan and the men.
"Looks like you're all right," I said. "Glad to see that."
Brittany said, "Yeah, we're fine. We hid out in the root cellar. It was great that we had it, but I can tell you that it is going to get a good cleaning real soon."
Kevin said, "Yeah, it's pretty bad down there. Got some mud on the floor and cobwebs everywhere."
Megan said, "Not now. All the cobwebs are in my hair."
Ryan looked at her and said, "I got as many as you did. We need to get a light down there of some kind, too."
Tammy asked, "You didn't have any damage from the storm?"
"Not that we know about," Ryan said. "The wind blew really hard, so we'll have to check on roofs and stuff."
Brenda said, "We should go back past Carmen's on that county road and see if anyone needs help back there. It'll be dark in another hour or so." ____________
Driving back the county road, we saw where a mobile home had been. It had been blown to bits and there was no sign of life around it. I didn't know the young folks who had rented it, but there was no vehicle there, so maybe they weren't home when it hit. We had to stop a couple times and cut up some branches and small trees to clear the road, then went on as far as the next county cross road. The tornado had evidently lifted up there, with only some damage to treetops, then hit again in the woods about half a mile away. It was getting dark, so we headed for home.
There was a Special Report on TV saying a tornado had hit the little town of Martinsburg and another had hit New Pekin--again. New Pekin had been hit hard by a really bad tornado 4 years ago. This time, a new factory had been damaged. It was built on the site of one wrecked by the last tornado in 2012.
"Sounds like that's a bad place to put a factory," Josh said.
The reporter went on.
"Volunteers are needed in the towns of New Pekin and Martinsburg. They should report to the churches in those towns where food and other aid is being collected. State authorities said they have emergency personnel on the way to the scenes, but their assistance will be limited to law enforcement, due to lack of funds. Local EMT's and firefighters are aiding in the cleanup efforts, and local law enforcement is on the scene. A spokesman for the fire department said everyone whose homes were damaged has been housed with friends or relatives, but they need donations of clothing and blankets for a few families who lost everything. Contact the voluteer fire departments who are collecting aid."
Tammy had a tear in her eye as she said, "I know how those people feel. I want to go help if I can."
Brenda said, "It sounds like tomorrow will be soon enough. Let's get something to eat and we can go tomorrow." _____________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 14:24:06 GMT -6
Chapter 51 August, 2016
"The state is broke and the county is too, so they won't be sending anybody out to clear the roads," I told Brenda. "We'd better do what we can to get the traffic hazards cleared out before we do much of anything else."
She said, "Those people in Pekin need help fast. Don't you think we should do that first?"
Tammy and Brenda had sorted out a pile of stuff to donate, mostly Howard and Charlene's clothing that didn't fit anyone we knew, and some of our older and less useful clothing and bedding. They had it all in old plastic grocery bags and were ready to go after breakfast. At the last minute they added 20 pounds of new potatoes, a few heads of cabbage, some fresh onions and 2 dozen eggs.
"Let's do both," I said. "We can work our way to Pekin and clear the road on the way, then take it from there."
They agreed, so we loaded up and took off with tools still in the truck. Josh rode in the truck bed, in deference to my old bones, with the rest of us in the cab. As I turned off the highway onto the county road at David and Carmen's house, we saw them moving trash off the highway. We waved and kept going until we reached a small tree we had to cut away to get through. It went that way for the 5 miles to Pekin, clearing out one tree after another. It was close to lunch time when we got to the fire station and dropped off our donations. The firemen and their wives were using their half-barrel barbecue grills to cook on, and thanked us profusely for the food. An assortment of picnic tables were piled with donations where we put ours. The women had labelled tha bags with the clothing sizes. As people began to come to eat, we saw the haggard faces. It wasn't hard to tell who had lost a lot.
We sat down and ate the sack lunches we brought while we talked to a young woman eating at the same table. Her house had a tree dropped on it, but otherwise was intact. She was going to take food home to her husband who was working on cutting up the tree to remove it. We offered to help and spent the afternoon getting the roof cleared so her husband could cover the damaged area with a tarp. Rain was predicted the next day, so they were really grateful to get that finished. The electric power was still off, but they had a gas stove that worked and had hauled some water home from downtown. Their yard and driveway was still a mess, but that could wait.
When we were ready to leave the man said, "We never got introduced. My name is Randy Hartman, and my wife is Kim."
We shook hands and I said, "I'm Jack Hesston, that's Brenda, and our nephew Josh and his wife Tammy. Hailey is the one who carried all the little twigs to the pile. We live over on the highway south of Salem."
"Oh! You're the guy who does welding?"
"Yeah, that's me. Do a little farming, too."
"I work at the sawmill over there," he said and pointed across the highway. "At least I did. It's a mess over there. Looks like we can fix it, though. We might have something for you to fix."
"I do some machine work, too, so give me a call if you think I can help." I gave him a business card with our phone number on it.
"Darn right I will. I sure appreciate the help here. I can sure get you some business and maybe that will help pay you for what you all did today."
"You'd do the same for me," I said, as I waved him off and we left for home. __________________
Randy called a few days later. "Mr. Hesston?" "Yes." "Randy Hartman. You helped me on the house last week over at Pekin. Well, I've got a deal for you." "What's that?" "Back on the county road across the highway from us, the tornado down a bunch of houses. There's one that the bank had foreclosed on, and they want the lot cleaned up. My wife works at the bank and they are worried about liability if some kid gets hurt playing around there. You can have anything you could salvage from there, if you're interested." "What about the owners of the house?" "The people that lived there got killed in the tornado. Found them way off in a field. The bank got it sorted out with the lawyer and they own it now." "I'll sure come take a look at it. Thanks for thinking about me." "The least I could do. See ya later." __________________
Josh was covered up with work trying to get some damaged cars back in running shape after the storm. Our driveway was full of them. I asked Kevin and Ryan to go with me to inspect the job. We took Kevin's car to save gas, since this was only for a look-see.
The mess was unbelievable. The whole house was gone, but part of a barn roof from somewhere had landed on top of the place. We decided there was enough useful materials in what was left to make it worth doing, bricks, metal from the barn roof, a lot of salvageable lumber, and a lot of scrap plumbing to sell. I went to the bank and made the deal.
The next day Brenda stayed home with Hailey and Josh, but Tammy went with us. I drove Josh's truck and pulled the stock trailer, and Ryan took his truck with Kevin. That first day we made 3 or 4 trips each to the landfill south of town just getting rid of dangerous trash. Broken glass, broken wood with nails sticking out, shingles with nails, household detritus, and broken bricks all went to the dump. There was a line of trucks waiting there, but it went fast enough.
The second day we got most of the old barn roof torn apart and loaded in the stock trailer, and had both trucks loaded with bricks we could clean and use. A load of drywall and broken walls was next, destined for the landfill. As we pulled away what had collapsed on the garage, we hit pay dirt. The owner had been a woodworker and had the garage full of machinery. There was some damage, but most of it was intact, made of cast iron and too heavy to blow away, the older, semi-industrial quality kind. Tammy even dug out a beautiful wood chest of fine hand tools. The workbenches had been smashed, but we loaded them anyway with their vises and fittings. That whole load went to Ryan's furniture repair shop in their pole building.
We spent the third day mostly cleaning up the small trash, raking the yard, and hauling it all to the landfill. Toward evening, I went to the bank and asked for someone to come out and inspect what we had done. A middle aged man went back with me and pronounced it a good job of clean up, whereupon I took him back to the bank. Tammy had been going over the lot with a big magnet on a handle I had, and got a bucket full of old nails and scrap metal. She had been sorting metal scrap and had their truck loaded with aluminum and steel scrap to sell. Kevin laid claim to some of the steel scrap for forge work, and the salvaged bricks. I got the metal roofing and the lumber. Ryan was the big winner with all the machinery, so he offered to clean up the lumber and roofing for me, and would help Kevin clean the mortar off his bricks and lay them up into a permanent forge and chimney. ________________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 14:25:25 GMT -6
Chapter 52 September, 2016
I was going for things to make a buck pretty fast for our old age. Hogs would do that since they are ready for slaughter at around 6 months old, while cattle take 2 years from birth to market. My bred heifers would take even longer to realize income, but they were for the longer term. Income from the hogs looked pretty good when I had a dozen dependents, but now that the free labor had mostly moved out, having to tend 50 head of hogs was more than I wanted to do with everything else. We got enough for the yearlings to keep us comfortable for the year, so I moved back toward cattle that needed only minimal tending. I had the shop for immediate income, and it was mostly inside work that suited me better in bad weather. I would be 70 next month and I just didn't have the get up and go I once had. ____________________
After supper we all sat around the table finishing our coffee and were talking about our day when Brenda asked, "What are you going to do with all that roofing and lumber you drug home?"
"Not sure yet. I thought it would make some good hog houses, but I don't think I want to get into hogs that big now. No matter. It will be good to have around if we need to fix a building."
Josh said, "Brittany might want it. She said they want to work on their barn and make room for more livestock. She's been watching what you did and said it looked like something they could do and still have time to do the blacksmithing and Ryan's furniture stuff."
"I could give it to them, but they'd want to pay for it. We could work out something if they want it. I didn't work all that hard getting it."
Josh went on, "They got a chimney laid up in the furniture shop, too. That was a lot of bricks you guys brought home. He has most of the machinery running now. They bought a little generator to power it. Said it's cheaper than paying for electric because he only uses it a little. He's got a nice shop set up."
"I'll have a talk with them and see what they want to do." ____________________
Estate planning had been on my mind. If something happened to Brenda and I now, it would be a nightmare. Our kids both had what they needed to get along now, but they also were the rightful heirs to what we had. We had our property in a trust for them, but that would leave Josh and Tammy out in the cold, and they were doing the lion's share of the work around our place now. That should not go unrewarded. They would need a place to live. And Josh had applied himself learning about machining and welding, too. He was a natural to take over the business I had started. I didn't know what to do about that and it worried me. ____________________
Kevin was making money with the blacksmith shop. He had begun to turn out a lot of kitchen items at a profit. The women loved his stuff because it was so much more durable than what they could buy for the same price as shoddy imported things. He had to work to build up a stock of pokers, ash shovels, and fire rakes during the summer because he knew they would sell when cold weather came. Ryan added to the selection with carved wooden spoons that wouldn't break, and hardwood rolling pins and cutting boards big enough to slice a side of bacon, or roll out biscuits and pie crusts. __________________
Chapter 53 September, 2016
Our county had a major budget problem trying to fund the schools. When Federal aid had stopped, they tightened their belts for a year, quadrupled class sizes, cut programs, and relied on State support from property taxes. Now all tax revenues had fallen so far that funding education was out of the question. Nothing had been decided while politicians dithered during the 3 months of summer vacation. At the last minute, school was said to be delayed until further notice. The County defaulted on its' bond payments for the school buildings and buses. Bondholders had no use for the property and there was no interest when the buildings were put up for sale. The schools sat empty. The county had tried to sell the buses at auction, but got no bid for most of them, so they were sitting on the old school property in town waiting for someone to make an offer.
A week later, the governor announced that the State could not possibly fund education. The State had purchased rights to some electronic media home school curriculum and would make that available to parents for teaching at home. Communities were encouraged to band together and pay their own class monitors for directing the use of these programs. State law had been amended to allow anyone with a high school diploma to do that. The law requiring students to remain in school up to age 16 remained in force, but the burden for achieving that had been shifted to the public.
Furious parents gathered in many places around the county and sought ways to get their children an education that did not require half of every day for one parent to teach them. The busy working lifestyles of parents could not allow that to happen. Information about the location of students was made available by unpaid local school board members as a public service, with suggestions for forming small community schools to reduce the need for expensive transportation. Most rural areas opted to teach their kids at home, since transportation was prohibitively expensive. Those in small communities soon formed their own school groups, often only 2 or 3 dozen students. Parents either took turns monitoring the classrooms, or, the larger groups hired a person to do that. Buildings were made available by the counties, usually those seized for unpaid taxes, often homes, or small business buildings.
In our neighborhood, a group of families that lived within a mile of the next intersection south of David and Carmen's home had banded together to deal with the problem. The county allowed them to use, and maintain, a tax-seized convenience store at that intersection of highway and county road. A chimney was built, a wood stove installed, store shelving moved around and assorted chairs donated. By Thanksgiving, classes began there with David Martin as the classroom monitor/teacher. Parents contributed to his salary according to the number of their children attending. He had 23 students that year, ranging from first to 10th grade. His salary was less than it had been driving the school bus, but he was glad to have the work.
What property tax was collected was put into the County's General Fund, per new laws allowing that. Public education became a thing of the past. ________________
The TV news said that the University extension in New Albany would offer a much reduced curriculum this year, due to lack of applicants and most of the buildings being closed pending lawsuits over non-payment of debts. Two professors were engaged to teach a total of 58 students, down from over 7,000 three years ago. _____________
Ryan and Megan had learned they were unable to have children and had long ago come to terms with that. Kevin and Brittany had considered having children, but the world had become a very difficult place to support them, so they had opted for birth control. That option became more difficult as time went by and finances made it even harder. Finally, they had decided on a permanent solution for that and gave up on having children. That decision was validated even more in their minds as they watched the education debacle. A declining birth rate was another factor that reduced the county population after the losses from the Flu epidemic and a higher death rate due to poor medical care. Census figures would not be available for some years yet, but from the number of empty houses I saw, we had lost roughly a third of the people in our part of the county. I had no idea how the bigger cities had fared, but from what we heard on the news it was not good there, possibly down by half or more. _________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 14:26:13 GMT -6
Chapter 54 October, 2016
State fuel tax revenues that had funded highway maintenance were so low that many paved county roads had been allowed to deteriorate. Patching was done with crushed stone only, so many of them began to be mostly gravel. State highways were patched, but not even the worst of them had been repaved. Enforcing speed limits was no necessary, due to the rough road conditions of most highways.
David dodged rough patches with his bicycle on the way to school, pedalling slowly up the long grade. His pistol was in the holster mounted on the handle bars in easy reach, in case he came upon a vicious stray dog. That had been a problem lately, but he saw none and got to the school 15 minutes before classes would start at 8:00 AM. A small group of students was in sight down the county road, walking together. One older girl carried a rifle. The dog problem had prompted that policy among parents, but nobody had reported seeing any but local pets for the past couple weeks.
There were 4 young students walking in from the south that arrived as David stowed his bike and unlocked the door. Noisy students came in and put their lunches, firearms, and jackets on shelves, then found their chairs at the tables, slowly becoming quiet when it was time for class. The weather was pleasantly warm, a nice Indian Summer day. David left both doors propped open for ventilation and started classes with handing in of yesterday's assignments. When he had given out new assignments for the day, he began grading the last ones, interrupted now and then by a student with a question.
At lunch time, the kids all grabbed their food and went outside to eat and chatter. David ate with them on a bench by the front wall and relaxed, listening to the soft rustles of small creatures in the nearby woods. He thought about his earlier life, with all its' challenges, excitement, and stresses. This was entirely different. There was no instant gratification, no stores filled with useless trinkets, no new fad things to buy and wonder how to pay for. Instead, he got to help some kids learn things, and set limits for their behavior so they could fit into society as it was now. He didn't make much money, but he thought that was all right because he had enough for his needs. He and Carmen were saving some money and reinvesting some in a larger garden operation at home. There was a little surplus that had bought him the new bicycle, some good clothes for them both, and other things they liked. He decided he was satisfied with how things were going. _____________________
I took advantage of the warm Fall day to work on tying a big seine I had begun to make when the last of the harvest was in. The sinkers for it were finished, cast from the old lead I had bought as tire weights some years ago. I had melted and cast the lead in an old muffin pan, then drilled a hole in each disc for the bottom net line. The top and bottom lines of the net were 1/4" nylon rope. I was slowly tying the body of the net using heavy nylon string. It was a slow process for a beginner at this, and one with stiff fingers, to boot. I am not good at tying complicated knots, but I learned to make this one after many tries. I had to re-learn it every time I stopped on this for a few days. I hate knots, but my idea of fishing was to be as productive about it as possible in the least amount of wasted time. Sitting on a bank with a fishing pole drowning worms is my idea of purgatory.
I had a picture printed from the internet and two trees in the back yard that were the right distance apart. I tied the top line about head high between the trees and began to follow the picture to make a gill net. Lines of string hung down at intervals that I was tying into a diamond pattern about 2 1/2" the long way. The net was progressing, now about 2 feet down from the top, less than halfway to my goal of 6 feet tall. I had been at it for a couple weeks now. I learned that a guideline string was a big help to keep the diamonds close to the same size. I wasn't all that picky about this. I just had a grudge against that lunker catfish in the pond and was determined to have him in a skillet next summer.
I felt like I could take some time for this kind of thing now. We had a pretty good woodpile that was dry enough to burn, but so far the weather had not been that chilly. The corn crop had dried down early and was already shelled and in one of the new feed bins in the upper floor of the barn. The other bin there was filled with oats. That should take some handling out the feed grinding process. All that was needed was to open the chute and let it run slowly into the feed grinder. Ryan and Kevin had done most of the work building that in exchange for my extra salvaged lumber and metal roofing. They were well on the way to having a big shed built onto the side of their barn where they planned to have a few feeder cattle next year.
Our pantry was full enough to do the 5 of us for at least 2 years. I prayed that we didn't have any more relatives descend on us like a swarm of locusts. I didn't expect anyone, since we'd heard that Brenda's brother Jim had passed away in the Flu epidemic, his son Kenny was working, and her other siblings were either doing okay, or were too far away to matter. My surviving cousins and nephews were doing fine the last I had heard. I fervently hoped so. ______________
Chapter 55 November, 2016
Horses are athletes, and need to stay in shape with regular workouts. Julie got some exercise taking care of our garden and wood hauling chores, but mostly she was a pet that raised some valuable foals for us. Our other pair got to work for the whole family doing gardens, hauling firewood and manure, doing cultivation, and other farm chores. They were never overworked, but they stayed pretty busy. This partiular day Tammy was helping me fork manure out of the cow shed part of the barn into the spreader. The team stood chewing on their bits and sometimes harrassing each other from boredom.
Clucking to the team from the seat, I drove off to the corn field to spread that load while Tammy finished shoveling the last bit out and put down fresh straw. It didn't take long to empty the spreader and get back to the barn at a walk. I pulled the spreader under the broad overhanging roof for shelter and unhitched the team. They tossed their heads a little and went straight to their stall, expecting and early supper. I fed them, Julie and her colt while Tammy fed the cows, each one with calf nearby. The calves had their own creep feeder out under the roof overhang and went to that as soon as they heard the lid of the feeder bang closed, knowing the feed would be there.
Tammy said, "It will be a long time before those calves are ready to butcher. Looks like we'll have lots of pork, though."
I had sold our boar hog to a neighbor with three of the old sows, already bred. The one remaining had not been bred and was destined for our freezer soon.
"Yeah, we might get a little tired of pork, but there is some beef left in there, and a lot of fish. I'd go after a deer if I thought anybody would eat it."
"I don't care for it either. I don't think Josh has ever had any."
"I think it's an acquired taste. It would probably help if you were REAL hungry, if you're used to beef. Maybe I'll go after a small doe after we butcher that sow. There will be plenty of extra pork fat there to mix with the venison. That should help choke it down."
Tammy laughed and said, "Let's just not tell anyone what it is when we make those burgers. Or, we can make meatballs out of it and nobody will know the difference. Mom used to do that."
"We've got plenty of garlic and Oregano we grew. That should work.
At supper that evening we told Brenda what we'd talked about and she approved.
She asked, "Are you planning to feed out this bunch of calves?"
"I'm thinking that we'll keep half of them to feed out, then use one of those to butcher next year. Ryan and Kevin want the other 5 next Spring for feeder calves on their place. Their wives said they are saving money for that now and getting the place ready for it. They've got enough grass for that many up through next Fall. If they buy just a little hay they can have 'em ready to sell by this time next year."
Brenda said, "Megan and Brittany want enough solar panels to run a freezer so they can butcher their own beef and keep it. The men aren't convinced yet, but give 'em time and they'll come around."
The phone rang and Tammy answered it. "Yeah, here she is. It's Susan," she said, handing the phone to Brenda.
Just hearing one side of the conversation, I couldn't make much sense out of it, but something was up, from Brenda's expression and the tone of her voice. When she hung up, I asked what was up?
"Well, they have an offer to buy their place, and they are thinking about moving out here. They want to come talk about it tomorrow." ______________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 14:27:17 GMT -6
Chapter 56
"There's a lot of rich people around where we live," Susan said. "This one neighbor owned a bunch of gas stations and I guess he was able to hang onto a lot of his money. We didn't go to him; he came to us. He wants to buy our property for his son. The old man likes the security features."
Art said, "We don't have to take this offer, but there aren't many chances to sell now. The real reason we are thinking about it is our jobs aren't looking very good."
Susan said, "Yeah, my job is the pits right now. I could put up with that, I mean, everybody who has a job gets treated bad now, but I can get into the hospital's financial records, too, and it does not look good for them. The hospital in Clarksville is getting more business now. We're just not getting enough to make ends meet. It wouldn't shock me to see them close any time."
Art said, "It's about the same where I work. We have always been the number two package carrier and we are getting our butt kicked. There's not enough business to go around now and Number One is able to absorb the cuts without dying from it. I don't think we can make it very long. We've had two plane crashes and the FAA has said they were due to poor maintenance. The fines and lawsuits could kill the company."
Brenda asked, "Are you going to need a place to stay?"
Susan said, "It would help. The real problem is we don't have a prayer of getting jobs this good the way things are. We need to do something else. That's what we were worried about when we put money into the farm."
Art said, "Susan wants to get with Stephanie about working in the dairy. I think I could help in your shop, if that's a possibility."
I sighed and said, "That may be the best thing. At my age it's getting harder all the time to keep up, and Josh can't do it all."
Susan said, "It's not like we're going to be broke. We'll have the money from the house, and w'eve been able to save a little after things settled down. We own half of the farm LLC, so what profit it makes is half ours."
"That's a big change in your life," Brenda said.
Art nodded and said, "We've been worried for some time, so we've been thinking about that." ________________
Thanksgiving day they were moved in and pretty much settled. They had the 3rd bedroom, and the living room was back to normal, so we weren't unduly crowded in the house. Susan had grown up in this house so she knew all about it, and Art was no stranger to the place either. It went really well. I knew we would run short of meat before too long, so I had been worried about that, but Art and Susan had brought their freezer full. The big problem had been finding a place for it and all the rest of their stuff.
A lot of it got stowed in the big barn for now. It wasn't exactly a panic move, but we didn't have a lot of time, either. Their buyer wanted possession as fast as they could get out, so we did our best. It was a good thing we did. The week before they got moved, Susan was out of a job. By the end of the month, Art's company had it's assets frozen by the Court in a multiple wrongful death lawsuit by the families of the pilots and crews who died in the plane crashes. He had taken his toolboxes home a week ahead of that. They were now in my shop and we were talking about adding on to the shop. The day after Thanksgiving, Susan announced that she was pregnant. Brenda was overjoyed. ______________________
Chapter 57 December, 2016
Art and I went to a Sheriff's auction in town, where confiscated goods were to be sold, among which were advertised several old firearms and some reloading gear. True to form these days, the bidders were plentiful, but money was not. Brenda and I were in pretty good shape financially, compared to most, so I could buy what I wanted. Art began to bid on the reloading stuff and told me it was giveaway prices. Since it was mainly for shotguns, I told him I would pay for the lot of it if he would do the bidding and get the best of it. Shotgun shells were hard to find and expensive.
I couldn't imagine what he wanted with the black plastic trash bags, but I learned later that both of them were full of the old plastic Winchester AA shotshell hulls. Somebody had been a trapshooter, he said. We went home with the back of my little pickup loaded with supplies and paraphernalia for the price of a tank of gas, $6.40. Shotgun shells cost 3 cents each for field loads and Art said we had enough to load a couple thousand of them. Then I thought about deer slugs. They cost over a dime each. I had a lot of salvaged lead at home. All I needed was a mold to cast some slugs, and I'd been a diemaker long enough to have no doubt I could make a mold.
Butchering came first, so we spent a few days getting that old sow processed. Then it took me a while to make the lead mold and a couple other tools. I copied some old Brenneke slugs I had, sacrificing one to the cause so I could accurately measure each part of it. My mold duplicated the center post and hole for the tiny screw that held the cardboard base wad to it. I cheated and used a carpet tack instead of a screw, being cheaper. It only had to hold the thing on there until it was loaded in the shell. Some experimenting followed, making a special punch to cut out the cardboard discs and a hand tool to form the roll crimp over the slug. Then I had to come up with a fixture to trim the empty shells shorter for that specail crimp. I spent several days monkeying with it all.
"That looks pretty good from here," Art said,
I had shot 3 slugs at a piece of paper draped over a hay bale. We walked over to look closer. At 50 steps away, the three slugs had hit within 2" of each other.
"That'll do," I said. "Better'n what I got with the last cheap ones I bought."
Art asked, "How long does it take to cast those and make the wads and all?"
"I dunno, I might do a couple hundred a day. I goes pretty fast."
"There's money to be made at that," he said.
We got busy. I cast slugs for a couple days and began to trim the flash off them while he did the loading. At the end of the third day we had 500 loaded slugs. We thought we could sell them for a nickel apiece, easy, and with the old gun laws gone, it was legal to sell them. This was deer country, so there was a market. We could undercut the stores at 5 cents each and get $25 for 3 days work. Most labor jobs now paid $20, or less, a week. If you had a job, that is.
Our supplies wouldn't last forever, but it was a good deal for now. I thought we should keep a lot of what we reloaded for our own use. After a month of fooling around at it part time, we had over 1,000 rounds loaded with #4 and #8 shot, and 1,200 with slugs before we ran out of hulls. There were enough other components to load that many more.
Art and Susan each had a 12 gauge shotgun, and so did I. Daniel, our son Brad, David Martin, and Josh each had one, and Ryan had recently traded work for a good double barrel, too. We did some trading amongst ourselves. None of us would need to buy shotgun shells for a long time, and we sold enough to friends and neighbors to resupply the reloading setup. _________________
Art's thing was sheet metal work and TIG welding, although he had done a fair amount of welding fabrication. He took over those aspects of our shop business right away, and I began to teach him and Josh more about machine work and heat treatment of tool steels. The combination of services we could offer got us a lot more business. Josh did the wrench work on cars and was pretty good now at body work and spot refinishing. Art could make body parts and all the goofy sheet metal parts that held cars together, while I was good at making replacement machined parts and repiring old ones. That also applied to farm equipment, so our driveway stayed full.
It got to be obvious that we needed more room in the metal shop. Business would pick up in the Spring when planting season came around, and winter was not the time to do construction, so any expansion would have to wait until next summer when our crops were laid by and the farm rush was over. We put out some feelers about finding cheap building materials for now.
Stephanie was relieved to have more help in the dairy. She finally got some days off after two years of fighting it with only Heather to help. They were turning out cheeses at a pretty good rate, enough to supply one grocery in Salem and one in Corydon, plus whatever local sales they had. It was making money, but it was a 7-days-a-week job. They worked out a schedule to get each of them some time off on the weekends. With Brad's day job, he had all he could do to keep up with the grain and hay crops. Daniel did some of everything, besides keeping up with maintenance on machinery and buildings. __________________
Josh and Tammy went to have turkey with Carmen and David, while Daniel and Heather had Ryan, Megan, Kevin and Brittany over to celebrate the holidays. We managed to get our kids to our house for dinner on Christmas day. Brad and Stephanie, Susan and Art spent most of the day laying around with full bellies. Talk turned to business soon enough.
Brenda said, "We have to work out something for Joshua and Tammy's future. They have been helping us here for going on 3 years and they dont have much to show for it. They've been really good to us, but you two are going to inherit our place someday, then what happens to Josh and Tammy?"
Art said, "Josh is a big part of making the shop business work like it does. If I had to take over now I couldn't do it without him.
I said, "That's how I see it. I want you and him to be able to take over when i can't do it any more."
Brad said, "I don't see any problem, unless Josh and Tammy want their own place. Susan and I talked about it and we plan to just keep things going like they are now."
Susan looked at Brenda and said, "If something happened to you and Dad, we could include your farm in the LLC and make Josh and Tammy employees if they want to."
"We need to talk to them," I said. __________________
Josh said, "That would be great! We've been really worried that if something happened to you all, we would be out of luck."
Brenda said, "You need some kind of security about having a place to live. We talked about that and we have ground you could have, but a house costs money. You could stay here as long as you want, but Susan is going to have a baby, and you might have more kids, too. It could get crowded."
Tammy shook her head, "We're not going ot have any more kids. When I had Hailey we fixed that. Even then we didn't think we could support any more."
Josh said, "Having our own home would be great, but we just don't have that kind of money."
I thought about that and said, "Maybe we need to take a hard look at that when the shop isn't busy. Art and I have been looking for cheap building materials to add on to the shop. If we find something, we can talk about it then. There's lot of empty houses around now, so you never know what we might run into." ___________________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 14:28:14 GMT -6
Chapter 58
The US had effectively defaulted on its' debt by means of devaluing the dollar to virtually nothing, paying off debt with the worthless currency. The default had been baked into the cake long ago, with the formation of the central bank's fiat scheme. Many had believed that default would cause wars of aggression by creditors, but the fact that the US didn't have much of value left to steal and the existence of its'still functional nuclear arsenal, no such wars occurred. Other countries had their own problems to worry about and could not afford war. The crash of the dollar had taken its' toll around the world.
Nobody would accept any fiat currency now. Settlement of trade debts was only done by the new Gold Bank formed by China, India, Russia, Brazil, and Dubai, with Australia and a few smaller countries joining it soon after. The death knell of trading in fiat currencies had come when Germany and Switzerland joined the Gold Bank, then France and the rest of Europe followed within a week. The US capitulated and rejoined world trade immediately.
The BIS no longer existed. The game of living on money borrowed from the future was over, so everyone had to live on whatever income they had. World trade had fallen to an abysmal level, so the poverty in the poorest countries was horrific.
The US dollar had stabilized again and was valued relative to other currencies based on the relative amount of gold backing each one. Although the US had the largest gold holdings, the US dollar ended at a much lower standing than others due to the massive issue of dollars, putting the dollar at #4, below Germany, China, and Switzerland's currencies. Italy and France had the same problem and fell further into poverty.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, Federal aid to Education, Agriculture subsidies, the Oil Depletion Allowance, government research grants, education grants, grants for studying the sex life of mollusks, foreign aid to the dictator-of-the-week, and all the rest of the Federal handout programs were history. Unemployment rates soared, first from the millions of government workers who were out of jobs, then the trickle down effect of that to the goods and services businesses that depended on them. By the time the new Congress was seated and the new President sworn in, there had been a traumatic rise in the death rate, but no Census data was available. The next Census would resemble one of the first ones, only counting people and giving age, occupation, and marital status. As a result, GDP had shrunk to less than 30% of what it had been the previous year, but that calculation would not be made for years to come.
State governments shrank about as much for lack of funds. Only the barest of minimum road maintenance was done, education had become the province of the individual family, and business regulation came to a halt along with 80% of businesses. Few larger corporations survived at all, and those were mostly foreign held. British Petroleum was now 80% of the remaining oil industry, with Dutch Shell most of the remainder and Exxon Mobil a distant third.
The example of replacing the entire Federal government led to the same thing happening at the state level. An incumbent had virtually no chance of winning the first elections. Many state officials were subjected to recall votes and replacements as people learned that the new politicians were not any better than the old ones. Soon they began to get the idea and listen to what people were saying.
US bankruptcy liquidation laws were changed back to what they had been originally, the US central bank was owned and tightly controlled by the new government, and the stock market was a shadow of its' former self. The FOREX no longer existed, but currencies were traded between nations as a means of settling accounts through the government controlled central bank.
Precious metals and major commodities were traded by international agreements between nations only, and brokered to companies and individuals through the same means, leavng little room for speculation. The huge agricultural commodities companies were broken up as violating new anti-trust laws. Prices had varied wildly for the first year, then settled to trade within fairly narrow ranges.
____________________
In the wild and crazy roller coaster ride of trade during the year following the election of the new government, death rates were high among the poor, the elderly, and others who had been dependent on government handouts. Only one television station remained operating in Louisville and was actually more reliable for news than the internet that was plagued by the most insane imaginings of posters purporting to be authorities or experts. Internet sales of goods had fallen to near zero for lack of counterparty trust and expensive shipping. Advertising, however, abounded on the internet, it being the cheapest means, but confidence in suppliers and payment options destroyed retail sales.
Retail buyer considerations reverted to who had what in stock and the cost of transportation from the outlet for the customer. That motivated toward larger inventories and the warehouse idea came back into vogue, supplied mostly by a restructured railroad system and a much curtailed trucking system. Many more goods were produced close to the point of sale, due to the cost of transportation.
The military Triumvirate had decided to stay in place for an additional two years to enable the new Congress and the country to acclimate to its' new methods and was still an informal disciplinary factor for some years to come. The President's Cabinet had taken on a whole new meaning as advisors. Incumbents carried the majority of the next 2 year cycle of congressional elections, apparently to give the legislators time to finish what they had begun.
I didn't learn about much of what was going on in that world of politics and finance until several years into the future. Our personal lives resembled when my Dad once did some phenomenal driving to avoid an accident. The police came to deal with the wreckage around him and saw his tracks in the snow, going down a steep grade, up the other side of the deep ditch, back down that side and then back up to an unharmed standstill on the road. The officer asked him "How did you do THAT?" Dad told him, "I don't really know. I was too busy driving." Our farm and family had operated the same way, by instinctive reactions to whatever was the emergency of the day. ______________
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 14:29:05 GMT -6
Chapter 59 March, 2017
Junk silver, the old US coins with 90% silver content, had been trading at face value again relative to the new gold-backed dollar. The old non-silver dimes, quarters, halves and dollar coins had been taken out of circulation by banks at the orders of the government when world trade resumed with gold. The difference was, those old silver coins would buy what they had over 100 years ago.
I had been reluctant to sell what remaining silver we had until the dust had settled, so my $750 worth of the old coins were still in their 3 sealed bags. There were still 47 silver Eagles in the stash, too. With silver bullion selling at $1.25 an ounce, those were worth a slight premium at $1.32 each, or $62. We had some savings netted from the recent sale of Julie's last colt, for a total of $1452 in cash. There was another new foal at her side now, and she was bred again. This would be her last one. Raising an uninterrupted string of foals was too hard on a mare, in my opinion. We didn't need the money, and Julie was a friend of mine, so I didn't plan to get her bred again. She was getting old now, at age 16 and she deserved a nice retirement.
Brenda and I had considered our fnancial situation and decided we could easily afford to help Josh and Tammy some when the opportunity came. They had been steadily saving money as they could. Josh had acquired more than one vehicle when the owner could not pay for repairs. He had sold all of them and socked away the cash along with what they could afford from his earnings. When we told them we would deed them 2 acres of ground behind Carmen and David's home, they had almost $200 saved.
Part of their lot was wooded, so the first thing Josh did was call the man with the portable bandsaw mill to cut some lumber. He and I spent a few days cutting trees and dragging logs with the team. I plowed a clear area and levelled it with the tractor and front loader bucket. From there on, it was pick and shovel work to dig a foundation. What they planned was a modest 24' x 36' house with a separate root cellar to be added later. We did the preparation and got the foundation poured that summer, in between farm and shop work. I told the couple we would give them $200 toward getting the house built, so it was up to them to stretch that money as far as they could. They had earned the money.
A newspaper ad for used building materials offered what Josh needed. That turned out to be our old friends Ansel and Donnie Deckard who were tearing down old houses for a local bank. We stockpiled what Josh needed in one of our sheds on the farm near the building site.
The welding shop got an addition that summer, too, that gave Art room to work on larger fabrication jobs without having to do it outdoors. It would take another summer before Josh and Tammy got a well and a root cellar dug and the house built.
Chapter 60 June, 2019 ________________
I was beginning to feel my 72 years, so I came to the house early for lunch one day and saw Brenda on the back porch hulling peas with Hailey, now 5 years old. Our original Kitty cat was half asleep in the sun idly watching her latest batch of kittens playing with discarded pea pods. I sat down to help until the food was ready and looked over the fields to the East and South. A crew of school age kids was picking strawberries in the two acre patch with David supervising, while the Carmen minded the roadside stand.
Daniel was disking ten acres of corn ground on Brad and Stephie's place with our team of Percherons, while their mother Julie was nursing another colt near the barn. David still had summers off from teaching at the one room school house a mile away. Those summer vacations were longer now, to allow the children to do farm work and to reduce school expense. Ryan and Art were busy welding up a tank for the neighbor's biodiesel plant while Josh and Tammy put the cylinder head back on a neighbor's aged farm tractor.
Susan and Brenda were making lunch with Susan's 2 year old boy underfoot, while Megan washed canning jars and got a fire going in the wood cook stove I'd built. I had been pruning raspberries along the garden fence. Brad was mowing grass between the trees of their fledgling orchard with a small diesel tractor. Their herd of goats had been expanded to 36 head. They were pasturing in the field beyond the dairy barn and the cheesemaking building. They had a commercial milking setup and the proceeds were making a good profit to share with Susan and Art.
Salem was functioning far better than at the low point, but things were much different. Instead of a fast food joint and a gas station on every corner, only one diner was still in business and two gas stations. One insurance agency remained with the guy who owned it only selling car insurance. The State had removed the 2 traffic lights and replaced them with stop signs that were much cheaper to maintain.
I got up and followed the women into the house to get a cup of coffee, my one luxury these days. They had a nice salad made with lettuce, endive, radishes, chopped boiled eggs, and a dressing made of sour cream dressing from our community cow that resided at Brad and Stephanie's place. There were ham sandwiches to go with that, and all of it was grown on one of the family's farms, even the wheat that made the brown bread.
I told Brenda, "We're still as poor as church mice."
She said, "Yes, we are, but we live pretty good."
I grinned at her and said, "Yeah, I think I can stand it."
We dug into that salad.
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The End
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Post by biggkidd on Jan 12, 2014 17:04:21 GMT -6
Really really GOOD story!!!
Thank you for sharing.
Larry
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Post by patience on Jan 12, 2014 21:08:38 GMT -6
Thanks folks. I mostly had 2 things in mind: 1) Explore another way this could end, and 2) Look at what happens when relatives/non-preppers descend on us. Yes, it is a very optimistic view of both those issues. Maybe it will help somebody think about these things and be ready for them.
I guess I was working on writing more about people/less about preps, and learning to characterize, too. Hopefully the prep angles worked in sensibly.
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Post by papaof2 on Jan 12, 2014 21:16:43 GMT -6
Loved it!
The preps fit in with the events - some stuff breaks, some things work out better than we expect - what we all hope we would be able to deal with in similar circumstances.
How soon will you have the next "I'm not quite finished with it" story? ;-)
Thank you.
Picked up another 10 gallons of 1-K kerosene today. The furnace likely will not get the controller board replaced until Friday (if then) and there are predicted lows in the 20's and 30's before then. Not having heat in the basement means the floors on the main level get COLD. The basement is mostly below ground, so those lows make the overnight basement temperature somewhere between 55 (where fully underground) and the high 30's (along the daylight wall). I did find a solution - running the kerosene heater in the kitchen and using the ceiling fan to move the hot air down to floor level, plus a small fan on the kitchen counter to move hot air down the hall to the bedroom and bath. Having tile flooring in the kitchen and hall, it helps moderate the temperature when the kerosene heater in the kitchen and the gas logs in the family room are turned off (at bedtime and when we're away) Just think of it as manual thermostat setback ;-) The gas logs are in a big masonry fireplace (48" wide firebox, 7 foot wide and ceiling-high brick surround) that stays warm for a long time.
Sent from my IdeaTabA2109A using proboards
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Post by kaijafon on Jan 13, 2014 10:43:41 GMT -6
awesome story!!! thank you very much. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
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Post by idahobob on Jan 13, 2014 10:44:21 GMT -6
Thank you!
Great story, and a little different.....no mutant zombie bikers! Heh.
Hope that you have more stories working in your head.
Bob III
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Post by patience on Jan 13, 2014 16:15:44 GMT -6
Just for grins, Here's a shot of Jack and Sonny doing the garden thing: The work shop: The hen house:
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Post by kaijafon on Jan 13, 2014 20:14:44 GMT -6
great pictures!! thanks!
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