Flashback Time

Pretty busy weekend.

Got two more months of co-op hours out of the way, working cheese early Saturday afternoon and bagging late Saturday afternoon. Bad weekend for it -- the weather was just gorgeous, and I kept wanting to be outside.

Made it home in time to take Will to a school fund-raiser for his Arizona trip. Went into Keene and got a few needed items: A new wheelbarrow wheel (solid, not inflatable), a good rake, some liquid solder, and a clothesline.

Woke up late Sunday and spent pretty much all day either gardening or cleaning. The garden is coming along, slowly. We've got a space about 10 feet wide by 75 feet long, so far. It'll go another 10 feet or so, then widen out to a patch that's about 15 feet wide by 100 feet long. The problem right now is equipment: I broke a shovel handle and a pitchfork handle. I was pissed.

Fixed the electric fence. I'm hoping it'll at least shock the crap out of Stink the next time he goes chasing the ducks. He's developed a bad habit of going into the pond after them. He won't catch them, but he'll become a very stinky Stink after splashing around the pond for 30 minutes. I caught him by luck earlier this week, turning a leash into a lasso and grabbing him from about 10 feet away. Pretty slick, if I say so myself.

It was beautiful Saturday, but I wasn't so happy on Sunday. Snowing. Not accumulating, but snowing. Damn. On the other hand, it's hard to sulk about weather when you've just finished reading The Worst Hard Time, by Tim Egan. It's a hell of a story -- a man-made weather disaster on top of the Great Depression.

For those of you who don't know (which should include just about anyone who reads this blog), I went to school on the High Plains, on the southern edge of the Dust Bowl. I'm reasonably familiar with the north Texas and Oklahoma panhandles where most of the dirt got kicked up, and I've seen my fair share of dust storms. You could tell who the freshmen were at my school; their cars hadn't been sandblasted yet, and they were still trying to wear contact lenses.

Anyway, you spend any amount of time on the Plains, and you hear old-timers talk about how bad things used to be. You'd see a dust storm coming from 50 miles away, rising about 10,000 feet in the air, and some old-timer would shake his head and mention that when he was growing up, a storm like that meant everything was clear.

The Dust Bowl was such a traumatic part of growing up for so many folks that it really interested me. I'd ask relatives about the Depression, just general "what was it like?" questions. Always got the same answers. My mother's mom lived in east Texas and just muttered about how those poor folks in West Texas got the sorriest deal on the face of the planet. Grandmom (my dad's mother) lived in north Texas during the worst of it. She'd smile, and say, well, it was bad, but everyone was so poor that it just didn't matter. Granddad would just look pissed off.

My great uncle and aunt, who lived in the town where I went to school, were a little more forthcoming. Aunt Mabel would shake her head and say things like, it was just horrible and a mercy that more folks didn't die. Uncle Clendon would just look pissed off.

A few years later, when Uncle Clendon wanted to make some salient point about how I maybe needed to apply myself a little more at school, he mentioned one thing that happened to kids without college educations during the Depression. He and some friends were trying to get a job doing warehouse work in north Texas. Turns out there were four or five openings. About 100 men showed up to apply for the job. The owner didn't have time to sort everyone out, so he made it simple: Work until you drop. Last five standing get the job.

Clendon got one of the jobs. But, jeeez. Worst, hard time, indeed. I'll probably have nightmares about dust storms for a week at least.