84-Lanc«st«r Farming, Saturday, Saptambar 16, 1995 On Being a Farm Wife (and other hazards) Joyce Bupp Bits of com silage litter the floor, natural confetti in shades of beige, green and golden yellow. This precious feedstuff also decorates the porches and lies thick along the roadside. Every time the forage chopper and chuck wagons pass, they drop bits that have clung to their metal parts dur ing the harvesting process. Breezes toss it, passing cars swirl it and tracking feet drag it all over the place. But the stuff in the house is not from passing wagons or from cars. It’s dropped, sneakily and steadily, from passing pants cuffs. Shoes. And pockets. Pockets arc among the neatest of inventions. Likely they were devised by one of our early, ancestral farmers who needed to lug around a pocketknife and cou ple of fence insulators and crea tively devised a pocket/pouch in r m FISHER’S PAINTING & FISHER’S PAINT OUTLET STORE QUALITY PA INTS @ REASONABLE PRICES I ■ all types of interior & EXTERIOR up J PAINTING ■ SANDBLASTING ■ ROOF COATING ■ RESTORATION & WATERPROOFING ON STONE * BRICK BUILDINGS HOUSES? - BARNS - FENCES - FACTORIES - ETC. Specialists In Sand Blastlng/Spray Painting Farm Buildings, Feed Mills, Roofs, Tanks, Etc. With Aerial Equipment WE NOW REPAIR SPRAY GUNS AND PUMPS 4056 A Newport Rd., Kinzers, PA 17535 717-768-3239 . On Rt. 772 Across From Pequea Valley School ‘Brush, ss>[[ Or Spray • We U (Do It ‘Either 'Way < . for Jobs Large Or Smad ■ Our (Men WUC Do It PIK . his animal-skin garment And life for farm wives hasn’t been the same since. Besides their obvious practicali ty for holding things, pockets make some jobs much more inter esting. Like laundry. Despite those perky ladies on the television commercials whose life seems to center on having the brightest whitest clothes, laundry is actually pretty boring. Most of us are just happy if we can see what color their T-shirts are when we’re finished if you can find color between the three-cornered rips, the tiny welding-spark holes and the giant blots of lubejoil and hydraulic fluid. But pockets add that exciting element of surprise. One of the items falling more frequently out of laundered pock ets in this household are small, tubular bits of sponge. Ear plugs. The Fanner II has been wearing ear plugs lor work around equip ment for several years now, much lo my satisfaction. Hopefully he will be spared the equipment-roar deafness that afflicts many farmers after years of frequent exposure to high-decible farm machine noise. No matter how flattened and misshaped those little sponge cap sules become under the weight of a load of damp jeans, they bounce back into their original form after a short time and are ready for re-use. Plus, they’re clean again. More plentiful than ear plugs is the predictable fanner hardware. Fence staples, cow eartags, assorted nuts, bolts, nails, washers and miscellaneous metal fix-it stuff are routine residue. This assorted lost-and-found, after it has been washed, rinsed and spun a couple of times, accumulates in a clean, empty yogurt container on the dryer and is eventually shuffled back toward the shop. Next to the recycled hardware is often a scattering of auction weight slips or parts delivery slips retrieved from pockets before they meet a watery demise. Though attempts are made to empty pock ets of paper prior to their journey through would-be cleanliness, sometimes the job gets only half done. Or not done. Then we have the extra added attraction of dark laundry speckled with soggy crumbs of bills or forgotten paper tissues left in pockets. Wallet fall out (Not usually money!) Or shiny • Agricultural • Commercial • Residential Partial In-Ground Tank Featuring Commercial Chain Link Fence (5’ High - SCS approved) • Retaining Walls • Bunker Silos • Manure Storage, Etc. Ufl* OOR EXPERIENCE WOBE FOE YOU-ESTABLISHED SINCE 13791 Sizes And Layouts To Your Specifications Wo Work Hsni For Customer Satisfaction! candy-bar papers. Empty, always, doggone it A few days ago. a different pocket problem turned up. Headed out for an evening walk, I stuffed a few dog biscuits in my pocket for the furry, white “grand-dog.” When I reached into that pocket to Some Escape Washington, D.C. Elderly poor people do not always remain destitute. A surprising number rise above the poverty line, even if only a notch or two. “Our analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) for 1968-88 corroborates other studies showing considerable movement out of poverty among all poor elders,” says Dr. Leif Jensen, asso ciate professor of rural sociology in Penn State’s College of Agricul tural Sciences. “According to our sample, almost 40 percent break out of poverty after spending one year in poverty,” notes Dr. Diane K. McLaughlin, deputy director of Population Research Institute. “However, their modest increases in total annual income and level of income-to-needs suggests that many of these elderly have moved only slightly above the poverty line.” Jensen and McLaughlin are co authors of the paper, “Do Poor Elderly Ever Really Leave Pover ty?” presented August 20 at a joint session of the annual meetings of the American Sociological Associ ation and the Rural Sociological Society in Washington, D.C. “Among people aged 65 or more, the prevalence of poverty and the probability of becoming poor are higher for rural than urban elderly, and they increase substan tially with age, due to widowhood. .A INC. 430 Concrete Ave., Leola, PA 717-656-2016 retrieve them, one waj missing. Poking a bit deeper, my finger went straight through the gaping hole in the pocket’s bottom seam. No one can ever justifiably accuse me of having “deep pockets.” But I can brag to my golfing brother that I get a hole in one. Elders Poverty disability and exiting the labor force,” Jensen says. “At the same time, however, there is also significant movement out of poverty among the elderly.” The Penn State researchers used the PSID data in determining what percentage of elderly poor were able to move above the poverty line after one year and over a per iod of time. The original PSID study sample of 5,000 families included a subset of 2,000 low-income families. “Of the sample group 0f738 rur al elderly who were poor for one year, 277 or 37.5 percent had escaped poverty after that first year,” McLaughlin says. The corresponding exit rate for urban elderly was slightly higher at 39.4 percent “We also learned that the rate at which poor elderly escaped from poverty is almost directly propor tional to the number of years they had spent in poverty,” Jensen says. “The more deeply entrenched die poverty, the less likely is the chance of exiting that poverty.” For rural elderly living in pover ty between 11 and 20 years, the annual rate of transition out of pov erty was only 5.7 percent (7 out of 123). Without considering number of years in poverty, 22.2 percent of poor rural elders exited poverty in a given year, compared to 25.4 per cent of their urban counterparts, McLaughlin says. Authorized Dealer For KEYSTONE CONCRETE PRODUCTS «H-Bunks * J-Bunke * Trench Bite Went •Hog & Odd# Stele
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