Northern Farmer

This afternoon I received a call from my wife to tell me that she had put two vehicles into the ditch going down into the woods next to our steep 600 foot long driveway. Over the weekend we got around 10 inches of snow. Since the snow started out as rain, there is a nice layer of ice under the snow. My wife first tried going down the driveway with one vehicle and promptly ended up in the woods. She then decided to try to pull the first vehicle out with my son’s pickup, and then the pickup ended in the woods. A neighbor then came over with his pickup. He managed to get the other vehicles out of the woods, but his pickup ended up in the ditch as well. About the time I came home, the neighbor had gone home to get his big John Deere tractor. I retrieved a bucket of salt from the barn and spread it on a portion of the driveway, hoping to eventually eliminate some of the ice. Part way through spreading the salt I discovered that the cats had used the salt as a litter box. Once the neighbor came with his tractor we were able to extract his pickup from the ditch and then get it down the hill. I drove his pickup home while he drove the tractor home. His pickup is ancient and it took me a long time to figure out how to keep it in third gear. The lights only came on after we pushed the dimmer switch on the floor and it seemed like every door was loose as I drove it down the road. Made me wonder how he managed to drive his truck around without losing pieces on the road. Once we got to the neighbors house, they checked out the tail gate on the truck since it had been bumped against the tractor while we were getting the pickup out of the ditch. The neighbor decided that the tail gate actually worked better now that it had been bumped by the tractor. I was very thankful for his help.

A few days ago I had dropped off some skim milk for this neighbor’s pigs and had noticed that he had lost a pig during the cold weather. So I asked him what happened to the pig, plus I was curious what he was going to do with it. I figured that it could be made into chicken, dog, and cat food. He said that during the cold weather the pigs had piled up together and this one had been crushed. He concurred that the pig should be made into chicken, dog and cat food and told me to come over some night and cut it up with an ax (it is frozen solid). So I will have to fit in this job in the next few days. Seems that it does not make sense to waste anything.

It is good when neighbors will help one another. In the past we have helped him clean out the pigs and provided assistance with other tasks. We keep his dairy cow and provide him and his mother with milk. Next summer my wife and another woman are going to help this neighbor’s 77 year old mother with her garden. She is extremely excited at the prospect of getting help and will probably expand her garden beyond its current size of about half an acre.

Jim V

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Jim V. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.