Opinion: When enough isn’t enough

Talk about it

Not so long ago, when news reports carried stories about bonuses for people who work in the financial markets, a friend asked me if I didn’t think those people had way more than they needed already.

I told him it was funny he should ask that, because I used to ask the same thing about my folks back on the farm. His question, in fact, triggered memories of me as a kid, using those very same words. That isn’t to say we really had way more than we needed or that I thought we were rich or anything like that. I knew we bought used machinery and inexpensive clothing. I don’t remember ever going without something I truly needed, but I didn’t have a cell phone, either.

No, I said we had more than we needed because of my mom’s garden and my dad’s hay stacks.

For a number of years, my mom turned a piece of ground east of the house into a garden. It was a pretty good place for a garden, close to a supply of water, bounded by a tree belt, nice and flat with good soil. When we moved to town, the garden kind of went by the wayside, but for a number of years it caused us kids no end of trouble. I didn’t mind the idea of planting vegetables. I hated the business of picking beans and pulling carrots and stuff like that.

We had fresh vegetables regularly, and when garden season ended, my mom went on a canning marathon, putting up tomatoes and beans and what-not for future use. When she finished cooking and straining and sealing the many jars of vegetables, the whole lot went into the cellar, joining rows and rows of jars from other years’ gardens.

I distinctly remember being on my hands and knees late one warm afternoon, picking beans and thinking of all the beans we already had in widemouthed jars in the cellar. And I remember thinking, “What’s the point? We have way more than we need.”

If you were following along when I said my mom’s garden and my dad’s hay stacks, you’re probably already ahead of me on that story. I say “my dad’s hay stacks,” but they belonged to my Uncle Frank, too. Those two brothers farmed together. We had cattle, wheat, oats, barley, corn, milo and a couple of other crops. We also had alfalfa fields and hay fields and several big pastures, dry lakebeds and shallow road ditches. Whenever things quieted down on the farm — when we weren’t working cattle or harvesting grain or picking corn — we cut and stacked hay. We had rows of stacks that wouldn’t quit, it seemed to me. Since I did a lot of the mowing, raking and stacking (the manual end of stacking) I had a lot of time to think about all the hay we had laid aside against a bad year. More than once, as I bounced through a rough lakebed swatting bugs and tripping the dump rake, it occurred to me that, with all the stacks of hay already at our place and Uncle Frank’s place, we had way more than we needed.

I told my dad as much one evening as he gave me a ride home for supper from a distant hay field. He never took his eyes from the track down the section line as he asked, “do you have any idea how fast all of that hay would disappear if we had just one bad year?’

I was 13 or so. I didn’t have a clue how much hay we went through in a year, although I had a vague notion we had enough to withstand 20 or 30 bad years. I shrugged, got home, ate, read an old Saturday Evening Post, got some sleep and got up the next morning and headed for the field, ready to cut more hay just in case the bad spell lasted four or five decades.

My mom’s birthday is later this month. She outlived my dad by 36 years, but she hasn’t been with us to celebrate this day for six years now. That doesn’t mean her kids don’t remember.

Terry Woster’s column is published Wednesdays and Saturdays in The Daily Republic.

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