I was an enslaved child. We all were, back in the 1940s. At Grandma’s house, we wee ones picked rocks, tugged at weeds, held stuff and moved stuff when the older folks harvested crops. At our own house, Dad made a mid-career switch from welding to college student. To get through more quickly, he stayed in Erie through most of three summers as well. That left you-know-who to do the weeding and tilling.

Here is an “old math” question for you.

Q: If one hour’s worth of garden work needs to be done, and Denny is the only child available to do it, how long will it take?

No, you don’t get “one hour” as an answer, even though in the math books, 1 divided by 1 = 1.

The answer is: At least an hour and a half. We must include the “dawdling” factor.

As adults, we might whack away at disagreeable chores to get done earlier. Children do not think like that.

When my own children came along, I continued to do most of the heavy digging, tilling, post-pounding and post-pulling – despite the exaggerated tales of “Dad’s brutality” wafted by my now-grown sons to extract sentiments of “Gee, you had it tough!” pity from their own children. I merely enlisted their help in return for, well, supper.

During all those years, I never really knew that post-pounders and post-pullers existed. Each spring, I would haul out 20 to 80 wooden tomato stakes, about 1 inch by 1 inch by 6 feet. I would find something to stand on that would not sink into the soft soil, giving me a step stool of sorts. From there, I could swing the sledgehammer downward to pound in the stakes. Reaching upward to pound 6-foot stakes two feet into the ground is a shoulder-searing operation.

Then in the fall, I would don gloves and wiggle each stake in circles until it loosened. I would then pull upwards. Sometimes, the stakes came out. Sometimes, they stuck fast, requiring still more wiggling. Quite often, they cracked, leaving me with 4-foot stubs that in subsequent years became 2-foot stubs, then kindling.

These were laborious chores.

When I moved to our farm nearly 12 years ago, I discovered a post-pounder in the old barn – but what a post-pounder! Its center is a 3-foot-long hunk of 6-inch steel pipe, with a steel cap welded onto one end. Its handles are brackets, like these – [0] – typesetting characters, welded to its sides. The thing weighs 40 pounds.

That post-pounder did drive 8-foot T-stakes into the ground to hold the snow fence that encircles our chicken runs. Using it requires me to stand on a stepladder or inside a cart. Even then, removing the pounder from pounded-in stakes requires lifting it over my head. Once – and only once – I was careless. The contraption struck me atop the head. I fell clean out of the cart, was knocked silly, and escaped death or serious injury only by chance.

So I love the concept, but I use the monstrous thing sparingly. My clean-and-jerk weight lifting days are long gone.

I continued to hand-pound smaller stakes, wishing for a smaller post-pounder. I am good at wishing, but not good at the mechanics of making or conceiving such things.

Then, Lo and Behold!

My love of wandering through Tractor Supply, Agway, Lowe’s, Rural King and the late, lamented recently closed Trader Horn stores paid off. There stood a smaller post-pounder weighing just 17 pounds, suitable for tomato stakes, and not searing my shoulders to operate. Its shaft is 3-inch pipe, just 2 feet long. I can heft it one-handed.

Those post-pounders have made putting garden stakes up an easy task.

But still, in fall, when it came time to get them out of the ground, I grunted and snapped off the tomato stakes.

Then Lo went and Beholded itself again! (Cue celestial music.)

There, in Tractor Supply, was a post-puller, a post-and-lever device weighing only 18 pounds and ideally suited to pulling those implanted tomato stakes out of the ground.

Last year, I pulled 100 stakes and broke only two or three. This year, I have so far pulled 50 stakes and broken just one. The post-puller will pay for itself in another year or two of not-bought replacement tomato stakes.

I also save money on liniment.

Instead of pulling straight up on stuck-in-dirt stakes, I push down on a handle that is about four feet away from the stake. It lifts a bracket that grasps the stake on the other side of a pivot point atop an upright bar.

Up come the stakes.

I am no longer enslaved. The post-pounders and the post-puller join my gasoline-powered tiller to move my gardening labor from slavery to manageable chores.

Who says you can’t learn things late in life?

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.