The Market Economy, etc.

On the way home from school, I once passed a pair of men working on a wooden contraption making rope.  These spinneret like things twisted skeins of rope in one direction while the all the skeins together were twisted together in the opposite direction.  You may ask why they did not simply go to a mall and buy the rope? There was simply no place to buy such things just as there were no places to buy ready made clothing, canned goods or most other things. Eventually they would come but not while I was little.

Likewise, I would see men replacing broken spokes in wooden wagon wheels. You had to first remove the steel rim and then replace the broken parts. The rim would then be heated to expand it, placed around the rim again, and cooled with buckets of water to shrink-fit it.

I remember my first experience with toilet paper. Newspapers were most commonly used in the outhouses but as the market economy began to penetrate our remote area, toilet paper made a sudden appearance. It took me a while to figure out how to use it, and that was with a certain amount of trepidation.  This toilet paper was the crudest stuff imaginable, amply saturated with sizable wooden splinters. You can imagine how carefully I used that stuff on that rather delicate portion of my anatomy. Sometimes things that are heralded as great advances are not such great advances at all.

While I saw some usage of chemical nitrogen fertilizers in the fields (broadcast by hand), the fertilizing mainstay remained good old Mist and Jauche. Mist is straw from the barn, mixed with smelly animal shit.  This was piled up in huge piles in the barnyard and then spread out in the fields and plowed under. Jauche is liquid manure. This was pumped into what looked like the mother of all beer kegs.  This giant barrel took up the entire lenght of a wagon.  You would then hitch your horse to the wagon, open the stopcock and haul the wagon back and forth across the fields, gushing manure all over the place. And the smell of these? Well, I will just leave that to your imagination.