We all work too hard. Or do we? On weekend mornings when my wife is off work, we fix a nice breakfast wash dishes, and clean up the kitchen. When I was a boy, we had no dishwasher. When my mom was a girl, the water had to be carried from the pump outside the house.

Her father and brothers butchered the hog and cured the bacon. Her mother made the sausage. Her sisters gathered the eggs, milked the cow, and helped make the biscuits and gravy. Grandma told Mom stories of helping to harvest and thresh the wheat each year and take it to the grist mill for grinding into flour.

Mom’s grandma told them she had to grind the corn and wheat by hand. They only processed enough each day for what they needed for that day’s meals. Her father went out in the woods and shot game for each day’s meals. Some days there was nothing in the area and he tried to catch fish. If that failed, bread or mush was all they had.

I work too hard when I plant my garden or mow my lawn. Some days the old push mower is hard to start. Last year I had to have someone help me put the belt back on my rider. Gas and oil are so expensive that some weeks it can feel like I would like to go back to the old push mower my dad used when he mowed their lawn on Nichols Street.

He told us, boys, that sharpening the blades on that mower was much more difficult with a file than taking the blade off our gas-powered mower and sharpening it with a grinder. He often wished that he was like his grandfather and only had to plow and harvest the garden and did not need to mow the yard because the goats and sheep took care of that.

In one of the jobs I had, I worked fifty hours a week for the same money I was paid at my previous position for a forty-hour week. I worked too hard for that money. At another company, I worked for sixty hours or more each week to get that business back on its feet. I spent three months with only one other employee to help.

I’ve read that in the early history of this country it was not unusual for factory and office workers to work an eighty-to-ninety-hour week for less than a dollar a week. That is why they came here because they had a chance to start their own businesses and not be dependent on an owner and would have something to hand to their children. Social Security did not exist until the 1930s. Most people could never retire unless their families could support them when they could no longer work.

I don’t even want to think about the farm by Marshfield that I went to with my brothers for two weeks each summer to help shovel out the silo, harvest the garden, and pick wild blueberries, strawberries, and gooseberries for little pay. Well, maybe come to think of it, I don’t work as hard as I thought.

Thanks for reading this, now I must go take my lunch out of the freezer pop it in the microwave, and wait a few minutes before I can eat. Life sure is hard in the twenty-first century.

©Copyright 2024 by Charles Kensinger