This is a Tribute.

To the hardest-working people I've ever known...

My parents bought an old house with three chimneys to accommodate the stoves in each downstairs room, and with no electricity or plumbing. Oh wait. There was a hand pump on the kitchen counter to the rainwater cistern, out back. The roof leaked, the stone-walled cellar got wet and the decrepit, rusted spouting didn’t collect enough water, even for two. The ancient wooden siding showed no trace of paint.

Then they renovated, removed the chimneys, replaced one, installed a furnace, drilled a well, laid a drain field and installed a septic tank, plumbed in a bathroom and kitchen, wired and connected. Yes, one of those they could “afford.” Dad worked all the time. All of it. So did all of us.

It was quite the event when someone named Campbell sold them Alcoa aluminum siding.

I’ve expanded this from a note, because I hadn’t mentioned the orchard Dad planted and attended on land adjoining, that he later bought. Or the tree nursery he went full-time on at age fifty. Or the many days Dad borrowed my grandfather's green ‘50 Chevy pickup so we could sell sweet corn, peaches or apples door-to-door, in town. Or Dad’s many customers whose grass he cut, trees and shrubs he trimmed and sprayed, or the trash he hauled. Dad had a full-time job managing a dairy processing plant complete with on-farm milk inspections in those days. He needed his college degree in Dairy Husbandry for that.

None of it should have come as a surprise. My grandfather came to town to marry a girl, without a pot of his own to piss in. He’d worked the railroads, installing tracks. Told us about the men's socks that all dried out around the stove each night.

“In the morning,” he grinned, “nobody knew whose socks were whose. You just took a pair of socks!”

So now granddad’s got a family and no job, no money. So he struck a deal with an aging farmer to rent his farm. He would pay rent each year when the crops came in.

The first year was the hardest, because he had no equipment. He borrowed a man’s horse and plow, but couldn’t find a harrow with which to break the clods.

So he went to the woods with an axe and he cut down a spruce tree, and it was that tree, branches shortened and pointed, that harrowed his fields.

Years later granddad bought his own farm, established a dairy and delivered milk in town. During the Great Depression. My dad related that not every customer paid, because they couldn’t.

“Doesn’t matter what’s on the order slip,” grandad would say. “They’ve got three kids. Leave three quarts.”

My parents were the hardest-working, most life-loving people I’ve ever known.

Now, you may think you don’t have those abilities, but by God, you do.

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