My neighbor, who came from a city where her husband worked for a salary, said to me, “It is difficult for any one who has worked for wages to get used to farming. There is a great difference between having a good pay check coming twice a month, or having only the little cash one can take in on a small farm. Why we have scarcely any money at all to spend!”
“You spent the paycheck for your living expenses did you not,” I asked?
“All of it,” she answered. “Every bit! We never could save a cent of it.”
“And you have you living now, off the farm,” said I.
“Yes and a good one,” she replied, “with a little left over. But it was great fun spending the pay check. If we’d had a little less fun, we might have had more left.”
All of which brings us to the question the little girl asked: “Would you rather have times or things” –good times to remember or things to keep, like bank accounts, homes of our own and such things?
Things alone are very unsatisfying. Happiness is not to be found in money or in houses and lands, not even in modern kitchens or a late model motor car. Such things add to our happiness only because of the pleasant times they bring us.
But times would be bad without some things. We can not enjoy ourselves if we are worried over how we shall pay our bills, or the taxes, or buy what the children need.
And so we must mix our times and things, but let’s mix ‘em with brains, as the famous artist said he mixed his paints, using good judgment in the amount we take.
“As A Farm Woman Thinks” (11), by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in The Missouri Ruralist, July 1, 1922