Remembering Shoveling Snow

Photo by Jerry Apps

It came quietly in the night, without fuss or fury. Another six inches of wet, heavy snow that clung on the trees and shrubs. It followed six inches of snow from the previous week and as many inches of snow the week before that.

I am on my tractor with a front end loader and box grader hanging on the back, moving snow, bucket full after bucket full. I am thinking about snowstorms when I was a kid and snow had to be moved. On the home farm, when I was little guy, we had no tractor with a front end loader. We had no tractor at all until Dad bought our first tractor in 1945, a Farmall H.

We shoveled snow by hand. With a scoop shovel, the kind used for moving grain from one place to another in the granary. We shoveled a path from the house to the chicken house, from the chicken house to the granary, from the granary to the corncrib, from the corncrib to the barn, from the barn to the pump house, where we cooled the morning and evenings milking. We shoveled another path from the pump house to the house and a path directly from the house to the barn.

And that wasn’t all of it. We shoveled the driveway from the country road that trailed by our farm to the pump house, so the milkman, who made his rounds every morning could load the four or five cans of milk that we had for the cheese factory.

THE OLD TIMER SAYS: Appreciate the labor-saving devices of today while remembering what it was like when moving snow meant shoveling by hand.

UPCOMING EVENTS:

Saturday, March 21, 1:30, Columbus Community Center, Columbus, WI Sponsored by Columbus Public Library and Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

Saturday, April 11, 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (Speaking at 3:00) Middleton Library.

WHERE TO BUY MY BOOKS AND DVDS.

Read about winter in my book, The Quiet Season (Wisconsin Historical Society Press)
It is available from the Friends of the Patterson Memorial Library in Wild Rose—a fundraiser for them. Phone: 920-622-3835 for prices and ordering.
Patterson Memorial Library
500 Division Street
Wild Rose, WI 54984
barnard@wildroselibrary.
www.wildroselibrary.org

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