[sleightofmind]

re: dragging a decent load

My father, born in 1930 in Minnesota, told of watching farmers bringing out a team of horses to help pull stuck tractors out of the springtime mud -- it wasn't only about their not-insignificant strength, but their superior traction. In his teens -- which would have been in the forties, he worked with teams of horses, which seems oddly late in the 20th century, but he did, as did my paternal grandfather. The terms for the various parts of the, to me, very-complicated-looking harnesses were as fresh in his mind in his eighties as they had been in his teens.