The spinning jenny is not a perfect tool. Nor is it a beautiful tool. But it is a tool that is a delight to use if you value your back as much as I value mine.
Our spinning jenny is admired by one and all.
The problem with starting farming at age 37 (15 years ago now) is that all of the common sense things you’ve learned to date are no longer useful. Things like the best walking route through the neighborhood to get to Bill Meyer stadium for an evening baseball game, or the best time to get a seat at Harold’s Kosher Deli on Saturday morning…. All were now useless. All new knowledge was hard won.
So for the first couple of years farming we built fencing the old-fashioned way: with sheer brute strength, mostly mine. I’d pick up a 50-pound-plus roll of barbed wire to chest height and begin walking backwards. Hundreds of yards of the stuff, up and down hills, through woods and across sunny pastures, lift, step back and back, until the strand was stretched.
One day, talking with an old farmer, I pondered that it sure would be nice if there were some tool you could use to unspool barbed wire. He suggested I purchase a spinning jenny. I did that afternoon, for about $10. And that, as they say, has made all the difference.
Fencing is still hard work. But a spinning jenny makes the job easier, and that is what a good tool is supposed to do.
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Reading this weekend: Conspirata by Robert Harris. The second of his historical novels on the life of Cicero.
Don’t feel bad about losing some hard won knowledge… things change. Maybe you already knew this, but Bill Meyer stadium has been removed, and Harold’s is closed. Fifteen years is a long time (to an 18 year old).
We didn’t have a Spinning Jenny at home. Did have a handful of youngsters just big enough to handle one side of a bar through the middle of the roll of wire. Down hill? Roll that sucker, and then at the bottom pick the weeds and stickers out of the roll. Not a particularly efficient use of time, but for a twelve year old it keeps him out of trouble all that much longer. Up hill – trickier, because the two have to cooperate enough to keep the barbed wire flowing evenly behind – not meandering toward one side or the other (and brothers being brothers… well – Mom always wondered how we got those little holes in our jeans below the knee…).
Ah, the benefits of kids on a farm, they get all the nasty bits and it gets called “play”.