As I mentioned yesterday, Clint is away this weekend, ice fishing with a friend about three hours west of here. He texted this morning to say he was having a hard time getting the heater to work inside the ice fishing tent.
I joked with him and said back when I was a kid, us Lenswoodites were tough and we fished outside all day without an ice fishing tent and only a five gallon pail to sit on.
Joking, but it’s true. If Dad decided we were going fishing in the winter, we jumped on the snowmobiles and headed south down the river to a supposed fishing hotspot, known to the locals as “the deep hole”.
It was a fun, albeit cold, way to spend a Sunday. It definitely beat having to do work around the farm, like feeding the cows or shoveling grain.
Really, nothing was worse than shoveling grain in the winter. It’s freezing cold outside, the snow is deep, then you have to crawl through a tiny doorway into this grainery and pray to god there’s no mice inside. It’s dusty and cold. And then you get your sweat on, shoveling grain towards the auger.
For any non-farm readers, the grain is your cash right, so once it’s taken off the fields, it’s hauled from the field to a grain bin or grainery where it’s stored temporarily. Once harvest is over and the bins all full, the farmer then starts emptying them into grain trucks and then taken to town to the grain elevator to be sold.
This went on all winter long. I’m not really sure why Dad sold when he did, I think probably, grain prices fluctuated and so he waited until the moment when he’d get the most money for it.
I absolutely hated shoveling the grain. Back breaking work. It was my younger sister and I’s job from about the age of ten I’d say. What added to the pain was that my younger sister is/was taller than me, now she’s about 5’9 and she’s strong as a moose. So I had to keep up to her, shovel for shovel. I couldn’t risk looking wimpy or not able to do my fair share. It was hell.
Of all the jobs we had to do around the farm, it was by far the worst. I’m quite content knowing that never again in my life will I have to shovel grain.
bloom.planted.north 
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