When I was growing up on the farm we had few urban friends. At least I didn’t. My acquaintances, mostly school mates, were,of course, all farm kids. So the only non-farm adults I ever knew were few and far between. One summer day a distant cousin of my mother’s came to our farm for a short visit. Her husband Frank Watson, a business man from the city, accompanied her. I was only 7 or 8 (1938 or 39) and accompanied my dad and Mr. Watson as they talked and we walked about the farm yard. Dad had some small task to do – I can’t recall what it was – but it required a fair bit of physical work so Mr. Watson said he would like to help. But he was dressed in “town clothes, the ones he wore every day, I suspect. So dad offered him a pair of bib overalls to wear for the job. Mr. Watson peeled down to his underwear shirt and shorts to don the overalls . By today’s standards he was anything but obese but he had a paunch ! Not a big one , but definitely a paunch ! I had NEVER seen that before in my young life. All the men I knew were hard working, hands-on, lean-muscled farmers without an ounce of fat on them. I never said a word but I was dumb struck. Funny how that brief moment remains etched in my brain some 75 years later.
I just returned from a canoe trip focused around a work party at a wilderness cabin. Mostly felling beaver-chewed trees, bucking it into lengths (some with a manual ‘swede’ saw) and hauling it in canoes across a big lake. There was a lot of other hard manual labour as well. Of the 10 men on this trip, the two oldest were lean, hard workers in their late 70s I’m guessing. And what do you know, they’re both farmers.