Hobos I Have Known

Things during the Great Depression of the 1930s were much different than they are today. Men, soon known to everyone as hobos, threw themselves at the mercy of the residents of the towns and villages they traveled through looking for increasingly scarce work. These short stories tell their story through the eyes of one of the rural people who fed them.Hobos became the face of the Great Depression for the people who lived on small family farms in the rural areas of our country. These farms were mostly self-sufficient. The farmers practiced living locally long before it became the fad it is becoming today with things like the hundred mile challenge. They raised their own animals, cows, chickens, pigs; grew their own fruits and vegetables; and heated their homes with woods cut from their own woodlots. For many of them, helping others was the natural thing to do when less fortunate strangers came knocking of their door.These short stories share the events that happened to one family in central Nova Scotia told through the eyes of writer's mother as she remembered and related them forty years later. The stories are presented as fiction, but each contains a kernel of truth as its central theme. These are stories I heard so often, that indeed the characters seem like Hobos I Have Known.