My mom and my Uncle Roger, who married my mom’s sister Norma, would argue about squirrels. My mom would talk about how she feeds the squirrels in the fall and winter while Uncle Roger would say that they’re nothing but large rats with bushy tails. He wouldn’t waste his time and money feeding them. They never did agree on anything about the furry rats except to agree to disagree. Well, I’m on the feeding the squirrels side for the most part. I had a neighbor who would use a catch ‘em’ alive trap for the little red squirrels as they would continue to chew on his electrical wiring on his house. That qualifies as being ok not to feed them. After he caught a squirrel in his trap, he would tell the neighborhood kids that he just relocated the squirrel closer to the river and by that he meant in the river.
Last year my 300 year old red oak in the back yard produced more than 100 pounds of acorns of which 90 pounds I put in the freezer, much to my wife’s chagrin. Yes, I had to displace some frozen pizzas and some frozen beef and one frozen lasagna to make room for the nuts. And by displacing them, I mean I ate them. This year there were no acorns on the backyard oak as it’s an every other year thing with it, so I actually have to buy some critter food. Now as Paul Harvey used to say on his radio program, this is partly personal, but to Keiven, I owe you another $5 as I was checking your corn on the old Kleven farm in October and about 15 ears of corn fell in to my Hy-Vee plastic bag. The squirrels sent the bag with me so they’d get some fresh Minnesota corn.
Speaking of the fall harvest, I was traveling up I-90 when I passed a truck that had the oversize load sign and flashing lights on it. As I got closer to it, I saw what was so big on the truck that he needed to take up most of 2 of the 3 lanes. It was a grain cart. This grain cart, like some I’ve seen in the fields in recent years, would hold more grain than many of the grain bins I used to fill in the fall. I thought back to the days of my youth hauling grain with a gravity box. Sometimes gravity failed to work when the corn was 30% or more moisture content. High moisture and low test weight corn defies the law of gravity. It made the unloading of the corn a lot more work. I thought we went big time when we used the tractor that had a cab on it and we hooked two gravity wagons in tandem behind it. The front one was our 250 bushel Parker gravity box and the back one was the small 180 bushel wagon. Those two plumb full wouldn’t even make a dent in that grain cart I passed. Compared to that cart, it was like I was pulling two bushel baskets with rope handles behind the tractor.
As I drive up and down the aforementioned Interstate 90, there are two Stonehenge wannabees. One is made of old pickup trucks, mostly from the 1960’s. They aren’t lined up like Stonehenge so that you can tell what time it is, but they are all lined up in a row in front of a windbreak, much like a used truck lot. The other Stonehenge is made up of old gravity box wagons. Now I think these are lined up so that you can look at the shadows they cast when the sun is out and you can pretty much tell the time by them. For me, it’s sad to see a part of American agricultural history that I lived through, just rusting away out on a hillside. But as I’ve been told, that’s progress.
