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| Growing up the older gentleman across the road had a 20 year old car, a 30 year old pickup and a 40 year old tractor. He owned 1 battery. I can still see him in his polyester suit, Sunday shoes and no socks going out to the barn and getting the battery off the tractor and carrying to the car so they could go to church. He also had a horse or two to work the garden with. He would carry a garbage can down the road to the field and using a butcher knife cut grass around the field edge and stuff in the garbage can. When full he would carry it to the barn to feed the horse. Never saw a bale of hay on his place. Remember one time he was hoeing cotton and when the fire whistle blew at 12:00 he came to the house for lunch. When he got done eating he started hoeing the flowers he always planted between the side ditch and his fence in front of our house. I being a little fellow asked him what he was doing. His reply is he was resting. I said looks like hoeing to me like he had been doing all morning. He explained that hoeing cotton was work and hoeing flowers was resting. I still did not understand. He explained further that hoeing cotton was work because he had to do it and hoeing flowers was resting because he enjoyed it. At 1:00 he threw the hoe on his shoulder and went back to the cotton field.
We just put Mom in the nursing home at 93. Can hot believe all the things she saved until we started looking. Drawers full of broken item to be repaired someday. Owners manuals for appliances that left here 70 years ago. She grew up very poor and when she finally had middle class money she collected things like glass wear, snow villages, and trinkets of all sorts. She would rather have 10 $1 items as 1 $10 item. We hauled off 7 dump trailer loads just to get to where we could start sorting things and house did not look like a hoarders house you see on TV. She just saw value in everything on matter how small or broken it was. | |
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Any one else’s dad as cheap as mine?
