Walnut Grove, Minn.- Recent reports indicate that area elderly man, Brewster Davenport, looks forward to an increased workload.
Upon receiving word that his daughter, Edna, planned to send her son Tod to visit grandparents Brewster and Virginia Davenport, Brewster eagerly reported to Charles Ingalls that he was excited about having another hand to help him clear fields and expand the farm.
“Well, now that you mention it, I must admit I was a little concerned when Brew said that,” Charles Ingalls reports. “You know I’m an advocate of farm labor, sweat making a man feel good, all those things I usually say. I think it’s good for a body to be busy–if you’re not you’re risking just becoming a busy body.”
Charles laughs for several minutes before continuing by noting that even though he thought staying active was a good thing, “I kind of feared in the back of my mind that maybe Brew was going to bite off more than he could chew.”
Noting that he had just rhymed completely spontaneously, Charles muses that perhaps Walnut Grove had a poet after all, even after John Jr. moved to Chicago.
“Anyway,” Charles continues, “When the boy arrived and was clearly trouble, well the whole thing just came together so nicely. I could use the boy to do work on my place, so that’s a huge part of it for me. I know that labor fixes problems, so that fixes the boy. But in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help thinking that this really helped Brew, too. Oh boy, there I go rhyming again. But like I was saying, by using the boy to work on my farm, it kept him from working on Brew and Virginia’s place. Not working on Brew and Virginia’s place meant no expansion, and no expansion means that elderly man isn’t working a huge farm by himself.”
Noting that this additional benefit is more like a bonus, Charles notes that this is one of his more successful family fixing quests to date.
Brewster’s idea of success, however, is different.
“Well, it sure is nice to have someone like Charles looking out for us,” Brewster confirms. “It’s just, you see, now I have this land that isn’t cleared. Now, that land isn’t going to clear itself and I was counting on the boy helping me. Now as I understand it, the boy did a lot of work for Charles on his property. I know he owed him for the watch, but it seems to me Charles could have saved a little time for the boy to work here. I was looking forward to working more, and now what do I have? I’m just an old man with a light work load.”
At press time, Charles was pondering how Tod came from Chicago, the same city where John Jr. moved and then cheated on his daughter, Mary. As Charles began prepping another load of lumber at the mill, he concluded that Chicago must just be bad.
