{"id":23554,"date":"2019-02-01T22:04:32","date_gmt":"2019-02-02T03:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/?p=23554"},"modified":"2019-02-01T22:04:32","modified_gmt":"2019-02-02T03:04:32","slug":"lessons-learned-on-the-family-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/2019\/02\/the-bookworm-sez\/lessons-learned-on-the-family-farm\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons Learned On The Family Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FebBook1\"<\/a>Ropes of diamonds and gold are not for you. A fancy car has no place in your garage, your home isn\u2019t TV-worthy, and you\u2019re happy with uncomplicated meals, hold the mustard. While it\u2019s nice to have luxuries, you recognize your quieter needs \u2013 and as in the new book \u201cSimple Things\u201d by Jerry Apps, you\u2019re grateful for them, too. When Jerry Apps was born on a little farm in rural Wisconsin in the midst of the Great Depression, his parents didn\u2019t enjoy the benefits of electricity or running water. Those things didn\u2019t arrive at the Apps house for many years, so the family led a simple life with a bounty of goodness. For instance, on the farm, Apps says, one of the first things you learned was to appreciate tools. Different kinds of shovels did different kinds of jobs, and a boy knew he was a man when he had his own three-tined pitchfork. Apps\u2019 dad was never without a pocket knife or pair of pliers, and Apps\u2019 mother had a different kind of tool: her apron, which was also a towel, hot pad and tear-wiper. Today, we notch up a thermostat when the temperature dips, but in the Apps household, keeping warm was a complicated task. Apps says his father rose early each day to start fires in the two wood-burning stoves that kept the family warm, \"FebBook2\"<\/a>putting a bucket of water on one stove to thaw for coffee-making. He then lit a fire in the pump house, one beneath the cattle water tank, one in the \u201cpotato cellar,\u201d and then he started barn chores. \u201cNot once did I hear him complain,\u201d says Apps. \u201cIt was winter, after all, and that is what you did when you lived on a farm in Waushara County in 1946.\u201d Back then, it was scandalous when one had a messy haystack, and Christmas meant two gifts: an article of clothing and one toy. A radio plus an imagination were all the entertainment a boy needed, except for the stories told on the porch, at the feed mill, and at the Mercantile on Saturday night. No celebrity gossip. No bumper-to-bumper traffic. No bars on windows and deadbolts on doors. No need to imagine, just read \u201cSimple Things: Lessons from the Family Farm,\u201d instead. Better yet, read it with someone who was also a mid-century kid, because author Jerry Apps\u2019 words will lead to conversations you\u2019ll be glad you had and surprise stories you\u2019ve never heard before. Apps is a master at description, so it\u2019s hard not to take a magic feed-sack ride back seventy years when reading this book, hard not to hear farm sounds, and impossible not to miss your grandparents fiercely. Indeed, this book may be slim (138 pages), but it\u2019s big on tale-telling and even bigger on nostalgia. You may notice some repetition here and there inside this book, but you probably won\u2019t mind a bit. It\u2019s too charming for that. In fact, if you\u2019re a certain age or you grew up on a family farm, \u201cSimple Things\u201d will be a gem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ropes of diamonds and gold are not for you. A fancy car has no place in your garage, your home isn\u2019t TV-worthy, and you\u2019re happy with uncomplicated meals, hold the mustard. While it\u2019s nice to have luxuries, you recognize your quieter needs \u2013 and as in the new book \u201cSimple Things\u201d by Jerry Apps, you\u2019re<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":23555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-23554","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bookworm-sez"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23557,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23554\/revisions\/23557"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}