While growing up as a kid I enjoyed farming, however, my parents couldn’t do enough to persuade me to get off the farm and go on to college and make something of myself. They meant well, as they didn’t want me to have the life they had, never having enough money to make ends meet.
And, there was always the hired man that had to get paid before any of the rest of us saw any money.
In fact, there was a saying among the more affluent farmers, a paradox of sorts, that farmers were the only ones who died a millionaire, but never had enough money while they were living to pay the hired man on Saturday night.
Without those Saturday nights, life on the farm never seemed quite the same. No more arguing about who got the washtub for a bath or frolicking around with the city kids, chasing the girls.
Just as Saturday nights changed, so did everything else when I went off to college. On my very first weekend back home, I noticed there wasn’t a milk cow on the place. When I approached my Dad about this, he explained that it just wasn’t profitable anymore.
You see, when I was home he sold me on the idea that milking cows by hand was a form of relaxation. So I had to ask him, “But what about all that relaxation?”
You got it. I had been jinxed again, for I was the one that had been doing all the relaxation, just as I was the one that was being pushed off the farm, always in the pretense of being in my best interest.
They may have fibbed to me a little about the relaxation part, but they were dead serious about wanting a better life for me. And who knows, maybe they were right. I guess it all depends upon how you measure life. If the riches in life are measured in dollars and cents, then I made the wrong decision by leaving the farm, but on the other hand it would have cheated me out of the rich full life that I am now living.
The cream would never have come to the top and instead of counting riches, I’m now counting my blessings, which are of rich reward.
