History, The Baboon Congress

The Old Home Place

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Header photo: threshing machine cc BY-SA 2.0

Today’s post comes from Jim Tjepkema.

My Grandparents operated a small dairy farm that was run by my Uncle after my Grandparents retired.   I visited that farm with my family on many occasions when I was young.  It was a small farm that was still being run in some of the same ways that it was operated when my Mother was young.  On those visits I learned about some of the old traditions that characterized farming in the Midwest many years ago.

One of my most treasured memories from a visit to the old home place was the time we were there when my Grandparents were hosting a threshing party.  Before farmers had combines that threshed grain in the field, stationary-threshing machines were used and bundles of grain were brought to those machines.  It was called a threshing party because a group of neighbors gathered to bring the grain in from the field and thresh it.  The threshing party I observed included a big noon meal, prepared by my Grandmother and women from the neighborhood, to feed the threshing crew.

By the time I made my first visit to the farm they had switched from using horses to using tractors for fieldwork.  However, they still had one of the draft horses that had been used to work the fields.  One of the years when we visited at Thanksgiving there was a small patch of corn still waiting to be harvested.  My Uncle hitched the horse to a wagon and we helped him finish harvesting the corn by hand picking it and throwing it into the wagon.  I was surprised to find out that the horse was able to move the wagon ahead without anyone riding in the wagon.

I learned more about the old farm during an extended visit when I was old enough to help my Uncle with fieldwork and milking.  Modern milking machines were used, although there was no bulk milk tank.  Pails of milk were carried to the milk house and poured into cans that were kept cool in a tank of water.  When my mother was young, they sold milk by bottling it on the farm and delivering it to homes in the nearby town.  The milk that my Uncle produced was hauled in cans in the back of his pickup to a local cheese factory.

My brother and I helped my Uncle with haying.  We helped load bales of hay onto hay wagons and then unloaded them into the barn.  The farm still had some equipment for handling loose hay including a hay loader.  I saw this equipment in action when it was used to harvest wild prairie grass, which was piled on top of bales of hay that were stored outside. My Uncle showed me how to use a pitchfork to stack the wild hay on the bales in a manner designed to shed water, thereby protecting the bales.

I have described some of the highlights of my visits to the old family farm.  Some other memories included: playing in the hayloft; taking the cows out to pasture; watching the birth of a calf; and feeding the pigs.  I was lucky to have seen the tail end of some of the older ways of farming practiced by my Grandparents and Uncle.  In fact, farmers interested in becoming more sustainable have recently rediscovered some aspects of those older farming practices..

What older ways of doing things do you fondly remember?

84 thoughts on “The Old Home Place”

  1. what a great post jim. i feel like i have been to a stop at the historical center or the mill city museum.
    one thing i fondly remember is playing music on a record player. it kind of allows a personal interaction that shuffle on the songlist of 100 cds doesnt. . the sound quality of an lp is so comfortable. i used to hate the pops and clicks as the needle hit a scratch or an imperfection on the record, now i enjoy it i still do listen on an lp but often just hit a button and let pandora pick for me. there was/is something so nice about picking an album that will be coming p and listening to 20 minutes or so of the music from that artist in that time frame. the option to flip it over instead of moving on to the next selection is always tempting if the music hits you just right. and in my case i have parts of the collection that remind me of others. plain janes collection over there, steves leo kotke collction over there. my bankers dads big band collection on that wall, it is fun to drift back to the time the music made its connection

    olden days are olden for a reason but some nice parts of life got lost along with the traditions. thanks for helping us hang on a bit longer

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  2. my wifes grandma mable died about 15 years ago. my older kids got to go to the farm in havana illinois and ride the tractor and see the farm when he was little. they would have a day when everyone would get together and roast a pig and play volleyball and drink the beer standing around in the barn and out buildings and have a good old family reunion. lots of the olden days stuff had been modernized but a lot of it still was around to. hanging on the walls of the barns for the kids to ask questions about. when she dies and it was time to clean out the barn and house it was hard because so much of it was not useful anymore but held great memories. we did save the ffa box her dad made as a boy with his name on top in letters made with a jig saw cutting plywood to shape the letters. no store bought letters on the walls f the general store in 1945 when he was a boy. today can you imagine someone making a tack box 2 feet by 2 feet by 3 feet and cutting out the letters for dale schierbeck one by one on a jig saw. if amazon cant deliver it in 2 hours is it really needed is the sentiment we are aim towards. i long for the times when the smart phone didnt rule the roost. your mind goes amazing places given the opportnity

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  3. What immediately comes to mind is my mother baking bread on Saturdays. She’d start the dough in the morning and by early afternoon (or sometimes lunch time) there would be fresh bread from the oven. I loved watching it rise – she’d put it on a radiator in the winter to help keep the temperature steady and warm. Extra fun to be had when I could punch it down. (When I bake bread, I also make use of my radiators for helping the bread to rise…and I still love punching it down.) Mmm…warm yeasty smells. Might have to bake bread this weekend. First you all get me thinking about overdue thank you notes and now bread.

    Thanks for the lovely post Jim.

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  4. tim, I have a fairly large collection of LPs including some of the best jazz and blues records from the fifties and early sixties. During those years collecting jazz and blues records was a big part of my life. I still have a turn table and like to listen to those old records occasionally.

    One of the great things I like about those old LPs is the interesting art work on many of the covers. Also, on the back of the LP covers of Jazz recording, and some other recordings, you could often find information about the artist and the music written by well know music critics.

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    1. i agree, the cover art and reading the back is kind of like reading the cereal box in the 60’s at breakfast. my friend joe the bass player in the band discovered jimi hendrix and cat stevens both long before they became popular just becaise you have to like a guy with an album cover like that.

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    1. Cynthia, that picture is almost exactly the same as what I saw at my Grandparents. They were still using a wood burning cook stove, as you see in that picture, and the men coming to sit around the a big table washed their hand in basin sitting on the porch.

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      1. https://www.google.com/search?q=grant+wood++winter&espv=2&biw=1304&bih=683&tbm=isch&imgil=4nW0oKRH9XgG6M%253A%253BvtXV9MpNKECILM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.artexpertswebsite.com%25252Fpages%25252Fartists%25252Fwood.php&source=iu&pf=m&fir=4nW0oKRH9XgG6M%253A%252CvtXV9MpNKECILM%252C_&usg=__3cse-RBERzmEICVQnrxlxzL-AGY%3D&ved=0ahUKEwjm-9fHuqfKAhWJVj4KHSWvBDUQyjcIJQ&ei=upyWVua2A4mt-QGl3pKoAw#imgrc=PL2E2DIYfIT3-M%3A&usg=__3cse-RBERzmEICVQnrxlxzL-AGY%3D

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        1. Iowa State University library has enormous Grant Wood murals. I worked there in college , and I had to walk down the staircase where the murals are located to get to my job site . They sure so beautiful, of course reflecting the best of the Iowa countryside,

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  6. My father’s parents and my mother’s brother farmed in southern MN just a few miles apart. I spent most of my childhood summers on their farms. I don’t know how old I was when he took me to a threshing party and let me hold reins of the horses…or for how long he might have done that. Then the dinner. Yes, milk stored in the cold well water. Helping with the separator. Watching the Sunday chicken dinner running around the yard headless. But did anything taste better?

    My uncle still stored loose hay in the barn. Pigs were fed “slop.” I spent most of my time as an older grade school kid hanging out with the horses. I remember trying to lift my grandfather’s 40 lb saddle on one of the draft horses…or was it the riding horse? Lifting isn’t quite correct, I tried sliding it up the horse. But I did ride the draft horse bareback.

    I remember dreaming of being a farmer, in particular raising horses. I think the dream is and was of being a child on a farm where the grown-ups did the hard work. My “farming” is strictly a hobby. But I am grateful for the times I did try some “old time” farming…pigs raised on barley and goat’s milk, home rendered lard, home raised chicken and goat meat, homemade everything…well, till the marriage gave out.

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    1. You had more time on that farm than I did on the one I visited, Cynthia. However, your experiences are remarkably similar to mine. The chickens were gone by the time I saw the old place, but I did get to ride bare back on the horse and help feed slop to the pigs. The food was very good including the wonderful doughnuts made by my Aunt.

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      1. My grandmother made what she called “bukken” which was sweet bread dough deep fat fried in home rendered lard (of course) with powdered sugar. Not unlike your aunt’s doughnuts, I suspect. I tried making them once for a family reunion…not as good as grandma used to make, for sure!

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  7. The things that spring to my mind are sounds: typewriter keys, and an old-fashioned telephone. I know you can get a traditional telephone sound for your ringtone, but putting the sound through a digital device is still not the same.

    I don’t necessarily miss *working* on a typewriter–correction tape/fluid was a pain, and that was an improvement on overstriking or having to start the whole page over, to say nothing of dealing with carbon paper–but there’s something about the clack of keys that’s so much more human and satisfying than the sound of a plastic keyboard. Plus, you didn’t need to buy and install a separate printer (with toner) to get your documents out of the thing! My roommate was gifted an old Remington typewriter, very similar to the first one she ever had, but we need to get it cleaned and repaired before it can be used. Now that my laptop is in a coma, I’m tempted…

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    1. Our book club read and discussed “Plain Song” by Kent Haruf…this is a quote from an interview with him: “Do you still “pull the wool over your own eyes” when you write? (In other words, do you still type with a stocking cap pulled over your eyes, so you’re unable to see what you’re writing?)

      Kent: I don’t do that much anymore but I still write the first drafts of my books, the first drafts of scenes working with an old manual typewriter and some old- fashioned yellow paper…”

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      1. Today the technique is called “dark screen writing” Turn off the computer screen (or cover it) and just type.
        I cannot do it. Oddly I have reverted to first writing with pen and paper. Odd in two ways. I used to hate ink and used pencil. My handwriting somehow as I age and my hands get so terrible has become much clearer. My wife for the first time can read it.

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    2. Having written books on typewriters and on computers, I fervently prefer computers. That is not to deny that there were auditory and tactile charms to typewriters. It was fun to hear the bell ding when the carriage worked its way to the end of its travel. It was even more fun to hit the chrome return bar and rip the carriage back to the left side to start a new line.

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    3. I still have a landline phone that rings the traditional ring. I always disliked the electronic sound of the newer phones. I have a touchtone phone for purposes of being able to communicate with automated menus, but its ring is turned off. The old rotary dial phone in the kitchen is the one that rings.

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      1. Someone (I forget who) has noted how language evolves in odd ways. We speak of phoning someone using a phrase like, “I need to dial up Greg.” Of course we haven’t been able to “dial” anyone for decades since buttons replaced rotary dials. But it would sound stupid to say, “I’m gonna button Greg.” Or “I’m gonna input Greg.”

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  8. At least two of the things I did as an older kid on the farm, not so fondly remembered, were shocking oats and walking the soybean field to cut out the corn stalks and weeds that were growing up from the previous year’s rotation. And the heat and humidity and midday sun. Not so good.

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  9. My dad’s uncle was known for his steam threshers, and his grandson has a big threshing party near Zumbrota every August. I have never been to it, but I understand it is quite the party over a couple of days and lots of people come to it.

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      1. There are at least a couple ‘old time’ festivals here in SE MN. At least a couple that I am aware of.
        The Olmsted county History Center has an event every year usually late July or Early August.
        They have some oat bundles ready for the threshing machine plus leave some to cut and bundle that weekend.
        There’s another one: http://www.steamenginedays.com
        in Mabel MN.

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  10. Because my dad’s family hit hard times in the Depression, one kid was chosen to live with relatives. They chose my dad. He moved to a tiny river town in extreme SE Iowa, a place with the musical name of Keosauqua, and lived there for six years in the 1920s. He absolutely adored that interlude in his life, for it was like going back in time (dirt streets, horse-drawn wagons, few telephones, outhouses, etc).

    The single thing he recalled with the greatest delight later on was the threshing parties. He was deeply moved by the sense of community that brought people together in a project that was as much a party as it was an agricultural task.

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    1. That must have been a brutal reality, to pick one of your own kids to send to live with relatives. Sure glad that your dad enjoyed his stay there.

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      1. You are perceptive, PJ. But it turned out in an odd way. My dad loved his mother, a warm and outgoing person, but had problems with his stiff, critical father. And Dad was always compared unfavorably to his “perfect” older brother, Paul. My dad had a difficult childhood.

        Oddly enough, being shipped away to live with his mother’s sister was the best thing that happened to him while he was young. “Aunt Let” was a big, brassy, affectionate woman who embraced my dad with all the love he had wanted but lacked at home. His six years in that idyllic little river town were the best years of his childhood. He quietly resented his father ever after, though.

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  11. Few people alive today remember farming the way I do. The farm of my childhood was much closer to LE Wilder than modern farming. I could go on forever to answer this question. The few farms around us were not large enough to have “parties” but we helped each other. I spent many hours with my father at other places doing several things. We had “parties” for such things as sawing up the wood pile for next year’s wood, which took four of us in all. For threshing, which took four but better five. For rebuilding engines, men sharing skills and helping to lift out the block with not overhead crane. Hauling animals to Duluth for sale.Erecting buildings, twice a barn, one ours, which is now falling to the ground. Building roads and bridges. Weddings and funerals were large public events at the old Knife River Valley old school house.

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    1. its not to the ground yet? did you visit it last summer when you were up there? i think you should get the last touches before you and it both are in different states.
      id give you a rice up to share the stories.

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  12. I did a little more research, and wow, my relative with the steam tractors is a real fanatic about old time farm equipment. The festival is called Boomerfest. It appears that hundreds of people go to it and they have food and steam engines and lots of drinking. The relative lives near Kenyon, MN. I am not exactly sure where that is. I found this article about the family history with steam tractors. I don’t know how to create a direct link. This relative, who would be the son of my dad’s cousin, is kind of a conservative redneck, but he sure knows steam engines. http://www.farmcollector.com/steam-traction/minnesota-family-history-steam-engines.aspx

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  13. I spent two summers working as a clerk in a flyfishing shop in Brule, Wisconsin. Our cash register was an old fashioned thing from an earlier era. It was cast from bronze, with a florid and highly ornate swirly surface. You would punch in the numbers of a sale, then spin a wooden handle that made the register throw up numbers on a display, ring a bell and cause the money drawer to fly open.

    The cash register was old enough that it literally could not imagine a purchase costing more than $50. (I could have that number wrong, but I think that was it.) There were not keys to ring up a sale higher than that. We sold some bamboo fly rods that cost $700 and some canoes that were more than that. To ring up a $700 sale, we’d have to enter $50 fourteen times.

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    3. My local hardware store had a similar cash register. It had old, squeaky wood floors and narrow aisles. Then, about ten years ago, it moved across the street to a newer building and it has more modern registers. It doesn’t have as much character now, but it still has more character tnan home depot.

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  14. Love all these stories – thanks for writing it, Jim.

    The house we lived in, in Winona in early 80s, still had a wood burning stove in the kitchen alongside the electric one, so I was able to learn how to use that – we tapped a maple tree out front, and it was a great way to boil down the sap. Also kept that part of the house warm in winter.

    Along with many of the other machines already mentioned, I miss push lawnmower, with that lovely swishing sound instead of the roar of the motor. The sound of rakes instead of leaf blowers, and while I appreciate that sometimes a snow blower is a good idea if you’ve had a 10 inch snow, this winter I like the sound of shovels scraping the snow away. Will keep thinking, I’m sure there are more.

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  15. Here’s another that some of us remember. Before electric driers became ubiquitous, my mom hung washed clothes out to dry in the sun. It was oddly satisfying to move along the clothesline to fix wet clothes in place with wood clothespins. The washed clothes smelled of laundry soap when you hung them out. When you brought them in, they had a clean smell from a day in the sun. Of course, my mom would pin up sheets or blue jeans on the outside lines so they would prevent passersby from seeing the underwear and bras hanging demurely inside the other items.

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  17. Not an ancient memory, but one that fits the conversation:
    We have friends who live in a cabin on a lake near Ely. In the summer, there is a track one can use to drive in. In the winter, one must use skis and it’s about 45 minutes to the cabin. Needless to say, they are largely off the grid. One winter a few years ago the husband of the couple injured his back and we accepted an invitation to come and help harvest ice from the lake. The ice, cut into blocks about 2 ft. x 2 ft. x the thickness of the ice, which was also about 2 feet are stored in an icehouse, in layers alternating with sawdust. This provides refrigeration well into the following year.
    These days, many ice harvesters use chain saws to cut the blocks but our friend had a pair of ice saws she had acquired in antique or junk stores. They are like the old two-man saws used by lumberjacks but with only one handle (obviously). One makes long cuts in a section of lake ice and then cuts across to separate blocks. The blocks are too heavy for most of us to safely dead lift, so one uses the tongs to get the block bobbing, then, on the upward oscillation, drags the block onto the lake surface. As you might expect, cutting ice this way is hard work and gives you an appreciation for the grit of our predecessors. It also was interesting to have had the experience.

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    1. This brings to mind a passage from a book, but I’m not sure which book. Maybe a Laura Ingalls Wilder? Surely another Baboon will remember. There is a group gathered to cut ice from a lake, and a character walks up and calls out “You flipped that coin yet?” and gets a laugh from the men gathered there. It’s a reference to an old joke about cutting ice which ends with one of the characters saying, “Heads or tails – who goes under?” – referring to the two-man saws that were typically used to fell trees.

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  18. My relatives left the farm too far back for me to have had any familial farm experiences, but I do remember a time before there were supermarkets. Shopping for a week’s groceries involved several stops– the butcher for meat, the greengrocer for produce and the grocer for canned and boxed goods. The grocery and the produce market were usually family businesses with both husband and wife clerking. I remember the produce market as a place where vegetables were arrayed on bins or tables with a recessed pedestal and in that recess, surrounding the table, were bushel baskets of root vegetables, tubers, and unshelled nuts. The grocery was modestly sized and was stacked to the ceiling with goods. A visit to either store meant direct engagement with the proprietors. There was no such thing as self service. The greengrocer would weigh and bag your goods for you, the grocer would retrieve your requests, often using one of those extension “grabbers” to reach items on upper shelves. In every case, my parents and grandparents knew the proprietors and their families and the proprietors likewise knew us. Shopping in those days also involved leisurely and sometimes extended conversation.

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    1. Bill, that reminds me of the way gas was sold in filling stations years ago. Instead of self service, there was an attendant who pumped gas for you, cleaned your windows and checked the oil level in your engine. I think that kind of service is completely gone almost everywhere.

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      2. Not gone everywhere, Jim. In Oregon it is actually illegal to pump your own. Why? The state passed that law to give employment to people with limited ways to earn a living. It feels so weird now to pull up by a pump and sit there, waiting for some guy to come and fill me up.

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  19. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Have I written a post about being a small child watching my mother’s family slaughter and process. Chickens for freezing? I will look in my blog file. If not, I will post what I wrote about this in a family cookbook I organized. Fascinating! Eventually the fried chicken which finally ended up on our dinner table, specifically Sunday Dinner, was the best. This was a process filled with doing things the old way!

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      2. This is how bakery work is – the first thing I did every day after I got home was take a shower. I could just feel the bakery on my skin!

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    2. Early in our marriage, my erstwife and I lived in a friend’s home on the banks of the St Croix River. It was an amazing property that had three ponds on it: small, bigger and big. The family had a pet duck, one of those large white ducks, living on the big pond. Its name was Sunday Dinner!

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  20. I have a book called Once Upon a Farm by Bob Artley
    with a full color drawing or schematic on the left hand side of each page turn, and a full page description on the right. He goes into great detail about everything from outhouses to feeding silage to… threshing. I think Clyde could have written it… I’ll bring it to next book club and… anyone want it after that?
    http://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Farm-Bob-Artley/dp/156554753

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    2. Here’s a sample paragraph on the Tractor Power page: “In the mid-1920s, Dad bought a Fordson tractor. With this new power source we were able to plow and disc faster and put in longer days than was possible with the limited endurance of horses. However, fieldwork would never be the same; something very good was gone. With the deafening roar of the powerful engine and the howl of the gears, all the quiet, natural sounds of the field were drowned out. And the exhaust fumes and the smell of the hot grease of the engine smothered the sweet odor of the crushed grasses and the moist, rich soil, as the steel mold-board turned it and laid it in neat ribbons across the plowed field, exposing a fresh furrow with every round.”

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      1. Wow — I just read the Wiki bio of this author, Bob Artley – he was from near Hampton, Iowa (on my back roads route home to Marshalltown), and later went to Grinnell College (Steve). And among his jobs as an adult, worked for the Worthington (MN) Daily Globe, where “he started a periodic and popular cartoon of life on the farm during his childhood called, Memories of a Former Kid.” Then after retirement “continued drawing feature panels that were syndicated by Extra Newspaper Features Syndicate based at the Rochester (MN) Post-Bulletin” (Ben).

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        4. Yep, I remember reading his cartoons in the ‘Agri-News’. (A Post Bulletin spin off).

          There is another artist that I always confuse with Bob Artley, but his name is Harvey Bernard. Had a studio in Chatfield MN and made these B&W images of farm scenes. My Dad had quite a number of them.
          (Not exactly, B&W… but silhouettes on boards.)

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  21. Hey all. No farm experience for me but I did think right away of the big black rotary phone that lived in the hallway – only one phone in the house, of course. I don’t remember the ring as much as the sensation of dialing the numbers and if you had lots of 8s or 9s, how you had to wait until the dial spun all the way back.

    There are probably folks who still use briquettes and lighter fluid for grilling, but nobody I know. My dad was the griller in our family but he thought lighter fluid was for amateurs. He would liberally douse the coals with gas, then standing as far away as he possible could, he’d light a match and fling it in. Combustion with gusto!

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  22. I still remember the the channel changer on the TV my parents owned when I was a kid. It had presets, but a very rudimentary kind of mechanical tuning. The channel options were 2, 4, 5, 9 and 11. If the set was on, say, channel 2 and you wanted 4, you would hit the right side of a rocker switch and it would make a ka-chrr, ka-chrr sound as it went up two positions to the next preset. Then if you wanted 11, you’d hit the switch three times. Ka-chrr to channel 5. Then ka-chrr, ka-chrr, ka-chrr, ka-chrr to channel 9. Ka-chrr, ka-chrr to channel 11. It was set to skip over the channels that had no programming. It was very advanced for its time.

    Now, of course, I have this converter box, afflicted with memory loss, that keeps forgetting channels. So I have to hit the “rescan” button every time it loses channel 4. The other option would be to get cable or satellite TV, and then I would have 90 channels I would never watch.

    My sister remembers when you had to turn the TV on a few minutes early if you didn’t want to miss the beginning of your show. The tubes had to warm up.

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  23. Lots of fun stories and memories today. I do remember waiting for the TV tube to warm up and also remember occasionally staying up late enough to hear the National Anthem being played before the test pattern appeared. My parents’ first TV remote was similar to what Linda recalls. Fondly remember the old style cash registers, the sound of raking leaves into huge piles, baseball (or playing) cards in bike spokes, rotary phones, playing in the hay in my aunt’s barn, playing LPs on my turntable. Not so fondly remember typewriters – love the “ching” on the carriage but even today my typing skills are mediocre. Despite being able to play the piano without looking at the keys, I cannot type coherently unless staring at the keyboard.

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  24. I remember our ringer washer – that’s why there were two of those old cement laundry tubs – you’d guide the clothes through the ringer (at least we had the electric, self-propelled kind) into the first tub of rinse water, and then from that one into the second tub of rinse water to be thoroughly rinsed. Then finally from the second rinse tub into the basket, and out to the line. This was the early to mid 50s – we’d had an automatic but it broke down so often my mom got disgusted and got the ringer…

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    1. We did have a wringer washer for a while when I was really young. We were always warned to keep our fingers away from the wringers so that they (fingers) wouldn’t get crushed. We also had a mangle for ironing sheets or other large items. Again we were warned to be very careful around the hot surfaces.

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  25. While I like a lot of modern advances, I wish that we didn’t have so many noisy yard machines. Lawn mowers are bad enough, but add in weed whackers and leaf blowers and there are some days I feel like I live in the middle of an industrial factory instead of a residential neighborhood. Leaf blowers are the absolute worst. As far as I can tell, they don’t do the work any faster, they just subject your neighbors to several hours of the loudest, most obnoxious motor sound ever.

    Also, I miss the days when people seemed to have more time to just hang out, talk together, have coffee, or do simple things like go on walks together. In some ways, I am more “connected” than ever before, yet I miss the more everyday interactions I used to have with people.

    Wonderful post, Jim.

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  26. Great article today Jim, Thanks.

    Fun to read all the memories of others.
    Much as I like my big tractors with the cabs and heat or AC and radios, I do miss the open ones and feeling the wind and getting the smells while planting or hauling wagons.
    Course there was plenty of days I was all bundled up against rain and cold too. Yeah… I think I’m over that. I’ll take the cab.

    I too remember butchering chickens. I had to be just a few years old. But chopping the heads off and dunking in hot water; yep, can’t forget those smells.

    You know those beautiful spring or fall days where we’re all stuck at work? I open the shop doors and look outside and miss the days I milked cows and was home and working outside all day.
    Remember Monday when it was 1 degree and -20 that night? I have the the shop door closed and I appreciate being inside and warm and dry.

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