The mo-ped was also a valuable tool for Dad. Near the end of the week, he said he would be going back to the old house to check on his beans in the garden as well as on our old neighbors. “Is there anything you can think of,” he asked Mom, “that we left behind that you could use?”
“All I can really think of is my sewing machine,” she answered. “Originally we thought it would be of no use without electricity. But the way things are progressing around here, the boys might be able to make it functional.”
“OK,” Dad answered. That struck me as a little odd. How could he bring Mom’s sewing machine back with him on the moped? Although, I recolected, Dad often had a way of making things work. So just after breakfast, off he went.
Later that morning, Uncle Jeremiah, Amy, Lynette, and I were working with Chip and Pepper, our young oxen. We were up to the point where we were actually leaving them yoked together for eight hours. They were getting used to it, were able to eat and drink while yoked, and even had gotten accustomed to being led around by us. We had started to give them verbal commands, not that they knew how to obey already, but they needed to hear the repetition of the commands to learn. The commands were simple enough. Of course, the obvious one was “whoa” for stop. Go was “hup”, left was “gaw” and right was “hee”. The actual word wasn’t that important, the sound of them was. Each had a distinctive ending vowel sound so the animals would not confuse them. We had just finished and Uncle Jeremiah was measuring them for the next size yoke that needed to be made soon, when we looked down the road and noticed a large charcoal gray Ford pick-up with some things loaded on the back approaching.
“Looks like the landlord from the old place,” I said.
“Wouldn’t know that,” my uncle replied, “but it’s your dad driving it.”
Sure enough, it was Dad. As he wheeled into the driveway, he throttled the diesel engine loudly enough to catch the attention of Josh and some of the others who were working close by. As they came out to see what was going on, we took stock of the items loaded on the truck. Of course there was Mom’s sewing machine and Grandpop’s mo-ped. We saw two cases of honey, a basket of beans from the garden and three implements that I wasn’t exactly sure what they were; one looked like a cultivator.
“Nice trade,” Josh said to Dad. “So this is what you got for our coal stove?”
“You remembered?” Dad replied. “This and more.”
“More?” Larry asked.
“Yep, the landlord’s son-in-law is a beekeeper. That’s where the honey comes from. But also in the deal are two hives of bees he’ll deliver next spring. That way we can have our own honey, but more importantly, ensure better pollination for all the fruit and vegetable crops we’ll be growing around here.”
“That hand cultivator is nice too,” Jeremiah said. “It’ll save a lot of hoeing when the time comes.” The hand cultivator had a high steel wheel in the front with wooden handles in the back, similar in design to a wheelbarrow. In between and at ground level was a row of narrow harrow like tines for scratching the dirt, making it loose for killing weeds.
“And look at that!” Joe exclaimed as he had just arrived and peered into the pickup bed. “A foot pedal driven grinding wheel for sharpening knives and axes.”
“And scythes and sickles,” Larry added. “We can sure use that. But what’s this third item?” The third item was shaped like the hand cultivator, but with a smaller wheel and a chain drive coming back to some kind of mechanism mounted under a metal box.
“It’s a planter,” Poppop announced. “One you can just push by hand through the field. It makes the furrow, drops the seed and covers it all in one pass. That’ll sure save us some time.”
“Sure will,” Jeremiah replied. “Do you have different plates for it?”
“Yep,” Dad responded, “in this box here with some spacing gears too.”
“Plates? Spacing gears?” I inquired.
“The plates are the metering mechanism. Round rings of metal with holes in that catch and drop one seed at a time. The holes have to be different sizes because some seeds are large like lima beans and others are smaller like sweet corn or pea beans,” Dad explained.
“The spacing gears,” Poppop added, “change the speed at which the plates rotate, either decreasing or increasing the distance traveled between each seed drop, hence changing the distance or spacing between each seed. You don’t plant every crop in the garden with the same distance between plants. There a chart for it?”
“On the underside of the seed box lid,” Dad answered.
“Good,” Poppop responded, “look here Alyssa. The chart tells you what gear to use with which plate to get the inches between seeds that you want. You’ll see when we use it.”
“Thanks,” I said, “looking forward to it.”
“And,” Dad continued, “got one more thing in the deal.”
“What’s that?” Josh asked.
“A Ford, four-wheel drive, diesel, pickup truck.”
“Neat,” Josh responded, “just for our old coal stove?”
“The truck couldn’t heat the house,” Dad answered. “Besides, what value does a truck have when there’s no fuel to run it?”
“Tank empty?” Larry inquired.
A big smile emerged on Dad’s face and then he said, “No, full. Part of the deal. Landlord filled it with the heating oil left in the tank in the cellar for the oil burner. It’s a forty gallon tank. I figure enough to combine twelve to fifteen acres of soybeans. Sound about right, Larry?”
After a little mental calculation Larry replied, “That would be just about right. No matter, every little bit helps.”
Poppop was looking at the beans and then asked, “This all there were?”
“No,” Dad answered, “they need about a week of good weather to dry well enough to keep. These will either have to be dried more, canned or eaten. If we don’t, they’ll spoil.”
“Either way,” Poppop responded, “these need to be shelled. I’ll take them in and we can get started on them. The cooks can decide later what to do with them. You picked them pretty quickly.”
“Had help,” Dad said, “a few of the neighbors were there. We actually picked more than these. I shared them.”
“Good for you,” Poppop replied.
“Which neighbors?” I asked. “Was Marie there? Did you talk to her?”
“No, she wasn’t, sorry,” Dad said. “But next time we go, you make the trip as well. Then you’ll get to see her. Everyone else seems to be doing fine. A couple other families moved into the house, must be about eighteen people in all. They had to take our things we left behind out into the wagon shed. No problem, I had told them. Next time we go over, I figure we’ll use Brutus and a wagon. Take Mom and a few others to pick the beans. That way we have a way to bring home the beans as well as anything Mom or Jean root out of our belongings that might be useful here.”
To be continued….. Mort
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