British Columbia weather has come to Saskatchewan
Now we have B.C. weather in Saskatchewan. We had a week of cloudy, hoar frosty weather and now it has turned cold. Next year it should be a wet June. We will see. This has not been much of a winter, so far, but we are a long ways from spring. As I write this we are two days from the shortest day of the year. Any time we get to the winter solstice without much winter, it makes for a short winter. Last year we had two months of snow on the ground by this time.
On the home farm, son Ron had John and Barry Davis come in with a track hoe and clean up some old buildings. My grandfather Karl Hult was a builder and he had some Swede and Norwegian cronies he employed. They built a lot of farm buildings. They may have been a bit short on English, but they really knew how to saw lumber and pound nails.
Ron has been in the yard about 10 years and seems to be on a seek and destroy mission. First he did in all the old 12-by-16 square wooden granaries. There were about a dozen of them. He hauled them out in the field and burned them. That wasn’t really a loss. Ron then knocked down the bunk house and a chicken house. There were some antiques in the bunkhouse. He didn’t save anything. He destroyed everything. I got to calling him Ron the wrecker. Then he knocked down the pig barn that had an overhead hopper to put grain in the chopping mill. There was also a tractor shed on the end that they could heat so the tractor would start in the winter. That all disappeared. There was a scale building and a cattle barn and another tractor shed. Gone! Now the only thing left was the chicken house, workshop and drive shed building.
The chicken house was about 24 by 60. Grandma Ida raised a lot of chickens and turkeys. The workshop attached to the chicken house was about 24 feet square. The drive shed was attached to the workshop and it was about 60 feet long. All the buildings were attached to one other so it was a long building. All the buildings were made in the 1920s. When the ‘30s came all building stopped.
The roofs were collapsing, the buildings were done. In their day these were significant buildings. Now after 80 or 90 years, the end was here. John and Barry loaded up the buildings into an ore truck and hauled the debris down to a slough area. The pile was burned and they will come back later and bury what is left. It was the right thing to do and it really makes the yard look different.
Ron actually looked at things that were in the buildings this time. He said he had found an orange pipe frame and wanted to know what that was for. I had not seen it in years, but I knew right away what it was. My father Arthur had bought it at an auction sale somewhere. I told Ron that there was a cone somewhere like a giant pencil sharpener. This cone went on the tractor PTO and the frame had a lever on it that held the post from turning and you pushed the post in with the tractor running and sharpened the fence post. It was positively the most dangerous invention I have ever seen.
Ron found a bunch of harness for horses. I’m sure that it would be all dry and rotted by now. He found some fire extinguishers that were red fluid in glass bulbs that you threw at the fire and were supposed to put the fire out. Some travelling salesman got Arthur for those things. There was a forge with a hand crank fan in the workshop. They salvaged the fan but smashed the cast iron table. What was the point of that? One is no good without the other. As my grandfather’s helper, I cranked that forge many a time as Grandfather was bending metal. You have to have just the right speed. No one does blacksmithing anymore.
Copies of the book compiled by my wife and daughter of my lifetime of writing are still available. The price is $30 and you can order by calling 1-780-875-3661.
Joke of the week: A 60-year-old man goes into the doctor for a checkup. The doctor looks him over and says, “You are in good shape.” “Yes,” the man says, “I want to live to be 100 years old. I eat only organic food, I do not eat red meat, I don’t do alcohol or drugs. I watch my weight and, if I need to, I go on a two or three day fast. I go to bed every night at eight o’clock." The old doctor shook his head and said, “Why do you want to be 100? You have taken all the fun out of living.”
