The Rural Voice, 1990-07, Page 12FARM
SAFETY
FACTS
FROM THE
WEST WAWANOSH
MUTUAL INSURANCE
COMPANY
SUMMERTIME AND
CHILDREN ON THE FARM
Safety Tips:
• Know where your children are at all times.
• Never allow passengers on any piece
of farm machinery.
• Shields and guards on machinery
should always be in place.
• Equipment that might fall such as front
end loaders should be left in the down
position.
• Always remove the keys from self-
propelled machines.
FARM SAFETY WEEK
Myr 25th to My 31st
When you need Insurance call:
Frank Foran
R.R. 2, Lucknow 528-3824
Lyons & Mulhern
46 West St, Goderich 524-2664
Kenneth B. MacLean
R.R. 2, Paisley 368-7537
John Nixon
R.R. 5, Brussels 887-9417
Donald R. Simpson
R.R. 3, Ripley 395-5362
Delmar Sproul
R.R. 3, Auburn 529-7273
Laurie Campbell
Brussels 887-9051
Slade Insurance Brokers Inc.
Kincardine ..396.9513, Port Elgin 389-4341
Dungannon
Ont. NOM 1R0 CO
519-529-7922
8 THE RURAL VOICE
RAIN OR SHINE:
COUNTRY MEMORIES
Keith Roulston, a newspaper publisher
and playwright who lives near Blyth,
is the originator and past publisher of
The Rural Voice.
It was dark when I heard the rain
start to fall one night late in May. I'd
spent part of the afternoon planting a
little garden — all the farmer I have
time to be these days. I felt good,
knowing the rain would be soaking
into the soil and beginning the miracle
of growth which would end up putting
food on our table.
The major difference between
urban and rural people, I think, is the
role weather plays in their lives. For
urban people, the weather report is just
something to tell them whether or not
to take an umbrella to work or wear a
sweater. Weather is something you
build cities to avoid. In Toronto you
can walk miles underground without
having to suffer blasts of icy wind
funnelling between the skyscrapers or
broiling heat radiating off the asphalt.
Climate control is the word. You
rush from an air-conditioned house to
an air-conditioned car, and curse as
you rush across an unair-conditioned
parking lot to an air-conditioned of-
fice. Along the way you do some
shopping in an air-conditioned mall.
Rain, to the urban person, is
something to be avoided. If you have
a patch of lawn, you might like an
overnight rain to keep it green, but
there is always the lawn sprinkler as
long as things don't get so dry there is
a watering ban. Weather, to the city
person, is peripheral.
But weather to the country
person is essential to existence. It
affects everything you do. After years
of being so attuned to the weather, it
becomes part of your soul.
I can remember the sick feeling as
a youngster of watching a crop wither
in the field because of a summer when
it never seemed cool and never rained,
knowing that the family's economic
prospects were withering with it. A
couple of years later it was the oppo-
site, as the swathed grain rotted when
we desperately needed a good crop.
Yet thinking back, some of the
moments of true contentment involved
weather. Is there anything that can
match the feeling of taking off that last
load of hay on a field, hurrying
because you can see the storm clouds
gathering? You pull the wagon into
the barn, shut off the tractor, and hear
the first big drops hammer on the steel
above you, knowing the job is over
and you couldn't possibly have done
it better.
If there is a feeling to match it,
perhaps it's the moments after doing
the chores in the winter. There's a
friendly, steamy warmth in the barn
and a quietness — just the sound of
the animals munching contentedly
away on their feed. Is there a farmer
who hasn't been late getting into the
house because he just couldn't tear
himself away from that sense of
well-being?
There is another feeling I re-
member from childhood — one I
haven't quite been able to recapture.
It was in the days when our house was
heated by a big box stove in the kit-
chen, a stove that made us its slave
from October to April — we were
forever feeding it. But on a stormy
night as the wind howled around the
house and the frost thickened on the
single -paned windows — with the
wood box full and the chores done and
knowing not only that we didn't have
to go anywhere, but we couldn't pos-
sibly go anywhere — that big stove
was the centre of all the universe that
mattered.
I don't earn my living from the
land anymore, but that little garden is
my tie with my father and my grand-
father and the rural way of life that
goes back to the clearing of the bush.
The rain that seeps into the garden and
swells the seed makes something grow
in me too. It's what reminds me that
I'm still a rural person, not an urban
one.0