The Economy and I

For the most part, that vague but enormous entity called The Economy has always passed me by. When I was a child, we were always poor no matter what The Economy was like. When I left home to teach school, I made what seemed like lots of money, but it always kind of disappeared, mostly to my folks, to whom we gave our wages until we were 21 in the Amish tradition, a whole other story.

Now I read that there was a terrible recession on during those first years away from home, but all I know is that I had a full-time job and a place to live and a car to drive, and at 19 I bought my first-ever new coat from a store and felt wealthy, and sometimes I splurged on 2-liter bottles of Diet 7up.

The economic winds have come and gone since then, and most of the time they don't affect me much. I hunt down garage sales in good times and bad. We do without until we can pay cash no matter how many furniture ads scream in our faces that we can buy this now with no payments for six months. We have always had a cushion of family and church in case of disaster.

But there's one way in which we feel the economic winds blowing, and that's with hiring seedsackers. A few years ago, Paul was scratching and scrambling for workers, as green employment pastures were wide open and it didn't take much to persuade a young man not to sack seed. Paul ended up filling one position with a shady character named Jim who was on probation and ended up in jail one weekend when he hung out with a convicted felon. And we think he took Paul's grandpa's old gun with him when he left.

This year was very different. Paul could have filled every position several times over with strong and upstanding young men. We got phone calls asking us to please consider someone; dads and moms asked us if we had work for their sons. We already had our crew: Felipe, who's been with us for over a year; Ben; Steven; my nephew Keith; and Matt driving forklift now and then, but we tried to pass these other names along to other farmers and cleaners who might need to fill one more position.

Then something happened in the last few days that makes me wonder if The Economy pendulum is swinging back: Felipe was offered a better job at Pennington Seed. Fulltime, with much better benefits than we can give him. And he really wanted to switch, immediately.

In a normal year, Paul would panic, as much as Paul would panic of course, at his night guy wanting to leave just a few weeks before harvest. But The Economy still is what it is, and Felipe had a friend waiting in the wings. Humberto showed up early for his interview and was promptly hired and sacked 13 tons of oats in 8 hours, out of sheer gratitude, I am sure, because he is married with a family and has been out of work for several months.

I feel sorry for people who are devastated by The Economy but I'm afraid I can't empathize.

Quote of the Day:
"It looked tired."
Steven, explaining why he brought a bee inside and was gently trying to feed it honey