BY J O H N H O W L E
HARDWORKING AS A MULE
“My favorite animal is the mule. He has more sense than a horse. He knows when to stop eating-and he knows when to stop working.”
Harry S. Truman
I feel fortunate that I grew up in Alabama at a time where my grandfather owned a mule that he plowed his garden with. As a young boy, I learned my “gees” and “haws” plowing behind a mule under my grandfather’s guidance. It was a peaceful way to plow because you only heard the sounds of nature as well as the occasional clink of a rock on the plow or the rattle of the trace chains. My grandfather would even tell me when we were hauling square bales of hay,
“Work more like a mule instead of a horse,” he would say. “A mule can work a steady pace all day and a horse works too fast and wears out quickly.” According to the "Encyclopedia of Alabama," the 1910 agricultural census reported that 60 percent of Alabama’s farms had mules. After WWII, mules quickly began to disappear from the Alabama landscape, replaced by tractors, chemical herbicides and pesticides, and mechanical
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