“You were lucky! We used to dream of having barbed wire....”
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We recycled barbed wire. One of my earliest memories is standing with my older brother and watching my father drag barbed wire from an old fence out into a field with a model “A” Ford sedan. He rolled it up and used it on a fence he was building with Red Cedar (actually a species of Juniper) posts he had recovered from prior use. He fenced the little farm off in sections so he could move cattle from one area to the other and had a little herd going but the year I turned ten we had a terrible drought and he sold the little herd for what one heifer had been worth prior to the drought. Our well was dry as was the little stream and there was only one little spring on the place where the cows could drink, we hauled drinking water on a one horse wagon from a neighbor’s well two miles away. These are facts, not joke lines.
Yeah, I like to joke, but I do have respect for those who actually deal with adversity instead of expecting the government to solve problems.
My family was fairly well-off. My father, though, was born in 1924, and had clear memories of the Depression. He remained frugal throughout his life. I could imagine him salvaging used barbed wire if we had needed it.