Memories of Rural Living Came Alive.

I remember playing in the straw, and still scratch when I think of it! (Click picture to zoom in)

When I was young, my Dad (a salesman) and my Mom (ex farm girl, turned secretary/office manager) both worked. I wasn’t into summer camp like my sister was so for at least part of the summer, I was shipped off to my Grandparent’s (Mom’s parents) 150 acre farm near Zenda, near Woodstock, Ontario. In fact I learned to drive on a John Deere tractor.
The tractor I learned to drive on could be here. Who knows?

Grandpa’s farm was mixed with all kinds of different crops and animals in two big barns. Chickens, cows, working horses… Orchards, vegetable gardens, cornfields, wheat fields and pasture land with a spring fed pond. During these early years from toddlerhood to about age 16 many months were spent living the rural lifestyle.
Wendy and I decided to drive over to Forest Ontario, about 25 miles inland, north east of Point Edward for their annual http://www.steamthresher.com/ steam thresher, tractor show. For those of you who don’t know, a thresher is a complicated looking portable machine that, driven by belt from a pulley on a tractor, separates wheat kernels from the wheat stalks. The grain goes into one wagon and the resultant straw goes into another. Most farmers never owned their own "thrashin’" machine so the huge dinosaur-like behemoth would be brought from farm to farm. The farm ladies would make tons of food to feed the men who would cooperate during the threshing. I remember the itchy straw stuck to the sweat down the neck of my shirt as the work always seemed to take place on the hottest of days. Later, ham and potato salad, home made bread, pies, tarts and much more made up for the discomfort. As a kid, believe it or not I actually enjoyed a bath after a day of threshin’.
The Western Ontario Steam Thresher’s Association is the oldest club of its kind in Ontario and has been described as the “Best Steam and Heritage Show in Canada”.
These images show life in a different era. Nowadays, air conditioned combine harvesters perform all the functions of the old threshing machines. Gasoline and diesel engines replace steam. Still, farmers of today need to have the efficiencies that come with these expensive new machines in order to survive in a competitive and highly risky business. My memories of olden days were through the eyes of a child. I'm sure there were many pressures back then too. Certainly lots of labor was required to get things done. When my Grandpa replaced his 8 horses with a John Deere, I'm sure he felt he was moving to "state of the art" farming back in 1954. My hat is off to all the hard-working farmers of yesterday and today who toil everyday to provide us with our food.