Old Papers Reveal Much

I did it. I spent the day going through my dad's papers that he had saved for years. The papers included canceled checks, tax returns, pay stubs, EOB (explanation of benefits) and a few very unusual items. One of those items is the goatee from my dad. For the Centennial celebration, he grew a full beard. When he cut it off, he did so in stages. At first I thought it was a mouse or something worse. If he had known it was in the box, he would have had great joy in looking at it and reminiscing. I found tax papers all the way back to 1942, the year my parents were married. I couldn't believe the paltry sum of money he made for the year. No wonder he felt so rich with his miner's paycheck in his later years of work. I also looked at the farm income portion of the tax returns. We had a large apple orchard, chickens, swine, and farmed (put out in beans or corn) our land as well as the fields of the neighbors. He brought in a nice sum of money for the sale of all those mentioned items, but when he figured the cost to operate the farm business, he showed a loss of $35! I couldn't believe it. I ranted to my husband that we had done all that work for the entire year and suffered a loss! Dad experienced a loss about every other year. The years he made a profit revealed less that $500 a year and usually closer to $100. I called my brother who is 18 months older than me to share the news. He and I were the ones who did the vast majority of the farming with our dad. When I told him about the loss of $35, he burst out laughing and said we should have just burned the $35. My husband said my dad probably did the farming to teach us how to work and to keep us out of trouble. Somehow being thankful for that lesson doesn't feel really good at the moment.