STRAIGHT LINES

Something I learned very early on in my farmwife life is how much straight lines matter.  Not lines of writing on a page, not when drawing a diagram, not even when sewing a patch on a pair of work jeans - in all these instances arrow straight lines are just being 'fussy'. 

"Just get on with the job!" 

"Just scribble your note down!" 

"Grab a pencil and do a quick sketch to show me!  Nobody's going to see me on the tractor - I just need my pants so I can get to work!"

But, and it's a very big but ... when a wife is entrusted with a tractor and harrows she had better put her perfectionist hat on.  Even newly married and still very much in love with me, if I made curvy or wiggly lines in his fields, it just made him twitch.

I thought his insistence on straight lines was just a tiny bit over the top.  There I was, learning how to operate a huge four wheel drive tractor, worrying about how far out those harrows swung when I was turning (don't take out the fence posts!), and making split-second decisions on whether that low spot was dry enough to farm or someplace to sink a tractor in mud, and he was all crazy about leaving straight lines behind me.  Sheesh.

Oh, I'm not saying that straight lines don't look nicer if you can pull them off, but it's trickier than it looks.  One would think, what with Saskatchewan being flat, and being that our entire province is surveyed on a perfectly square grid system, that straight lines would be in our DNA.  Sadly, this is not the case. 

Saskatchewan doesn't exactly live up to it's tabletop flat billing.  There are places that are pretty level, and there are places of high hills and deep valleys - and the other 95% is rolling farm land.  There are bluffs of trees in the way, rocky creek beds to avoid, and countless sloughs in the low spots; all places to go around.  You can start out, your first line right against the municipal road allowance, arrow straight, and by the time you've crossed the field twice you're already off kilter.  Well, at least, I am.

He tried valiantly to coach me.  "There's a science to it", he would say, "it's not hard."  He had been doing it since his early teens; I was trying to pick it up at almost twice that age.  I think I missed my sweet spot of 'field talent development'.

"You just set your sights on a land mark directly in front of you.  Way in the distance.  Just aim for that one tree, or road sign, or rock pile, and your line will be straight." His confidence that this was going to work always amazed me. 

"And when you get to a slough, just do a headland around it and then come around and pick up your line on the other side and make for your land mark again."  Simple.  Just like that.  And don't do it twice just to 'pretty up' a sloppy first time; that wastes time and fuel.  But again: it's simple.  Just like that.

Every once in a blue moon, just like when the total at the grocery till comes out to an even $72.00, karma would allow me maybe 5 swipes of a field arrow straight, but I never let this go to my head.  I know a fluke when I see one.  I never did master the art (and it is an art) of consistent straight lines but I did get so I planned a field so that I would be out of sight of the road before my lines got too wonky. 

Two things though: he judged other farmers by how straight their lines were (I wasn't alone), and I was never given the job of seeding - way too permanent to see those rows growing crooked for a full season.

The way he feels about my garden rows not being straight is something I choose to ignore.  They're MY rows.  I garden to de-stress, and the vegetables taste the same.

I just came in from mowing the yard.  It's a huge expanse of grass and I have a wonderful zero turn lawn mower to do the job with.  Just for the fun of it I try to change the pattern I mow from one time to the next.  Today's operation was a diagonal, which meant I had to pick a landmark on the other side of the yard for my first line.  I failed miserably, and spent the rest of my time trying to get the 'wow' out of my 'straight' line.  Took me back to the good old days.

He wasn't home to see it, thank goodness.  He's working for a neighbour - seeding... in a tractor with GPS.  His lines have never been straighter, and this time there is "a science to it".

                                                 PURE POTENTIAL

“Give a woman an inch and she’ll take a mile.”

It’s an old adage and there’s probably some truth to it although I’m pretty sure you could substitute words like ‘kid’, ‘man’, ‘teenager’, or ‘dog’ for ‘woman’ and it would be just as true.  With the #metoo movement going full on these days it’s important to keep things non sexist.

On the other hand, if you were to say “Give a gardener a square foot and of dirt a single petunia and there will never be an end to their expansion plans.”  My husband is fully aware of this.  So was my dad, and his father-in-law before him, not to mention the two sons-in-law we have acquired.   The women in our family have this gardening bug bad.  Or maybe, I should say we have it good – wherever we go we manage to carve out a space and create our very own happy place.

More than it being a simple matter of just plunking seeds or bedding plants in the ground, what sets true gardeners apart from folks who fill flower beds that already exist is that we would never think of stopping at the status quo.  It would just make us twitch.

In fact, we could not be happier than when we’re offered a whole new space to play with: a wide open untouched space, an absolute blank slate.  To a non-gardener it might look like a plot of land – a reason to buy a bigger lawnmower.  To a gardener it is a canvas to fill with colour and texture and scent.  And we can’t wait to get started.

Non-gardeners tend to see obstacles, whereas gardeners picture a whole array of options when presented with the same bit of real estate.  Things like rocks and trees and slopes present unfulfilled features to be added to, augmented, and enhanced.  “They” see work.  “We” see pure potential.

My personal chunk of prairie has been a work in progress for the past 35 years.  Over time the original shelterbelt/windbreak has been bolstered with new rows of trees, the vegetable garden has occupied four different locations looking for ‘the perfect spot’, and while we’ve added on to the house twice, we’ve also added two man-made hills to give the house a prettier setting.   We’ve built an impressive rock garden into a slope and then moved all those huge rocks and installed them a new hillside a decade later because of the snow removal difficulties the first location caused.  Although seeing the first one destroyed nearly broke my heart, the new one is, as promised, bigger and better with even more rocks.  My on-going project is to clear the deadfall and broken branches out of the tree line – the part I’ve got done looks so nice, proof that I have to keep going.  Lately we have opened up a new area and planted everything from apples and cherries, asparagus and strawberries, saskatoons, currents and grapes.  If we live long enough we will enjoy an orchard too. 

It’s a lot of work.  I love every square inch of it.

This week I was given a great compliment and a new challenge.  A young neighbour has asked me to help her create a garden in her yard.  She, like I did, finds herself in a large farmyard with only a few remnants of a previous woman’s touch.  She, like I did, sees pure potential.  We are both excited to get started.

                                                      A LITTLE MORE ORPHANED

I don’t know if it’s a tradition bigger than our little home town, but it’s customary here to post funeral notices at the post office.   I have no idea how this came to be a thing but it works well: everyone comes for their mail so the word gets out quickly and yet the post office lobby is usually a room you have to yourself when you’re there.   There have been a few times when I was glad to be alone when confronted with news of a sudden death, or the end of a long struggle with some terrible disease.  It allows for a private moment to adjust to the news.  Sometimes that’s important.

One such card caught me a little off guard not too long ago.  I saw the name and was thankful for a private moment or two to read the whole card and acknowledge the sadness I felt.  It wasn’t that I was surprised by the news – it just so happened that a few weeks earlier this gentleman and I had a conversation while he waited for his wife to do the grocery shopping.  I could clearly see his health was not good.  It seemed that he had aged twenty years since I had last seen him, although at most only a couple months time had passed since then.  He looked frail.  He had lost so much weight.

Our visit hadn’t been a long one, mostly because just the effort of speaking left him winded and I didn’t want to tire him.  The conversation had trended to life philosophies and although I don’t know if he used these exact words what I remember him saying is “I think I’ve run my race.”  I felt sadness then too: I’m not the kind of person who will argue against the truth, and we both knew he spoke the truth.

Still, the funeral card in the quiet of the Post Office lobby was a sad sight for me.  Another one is gone.  Again I felt just that little bit more orphaned.

Let me explain.

My own parents are both gone; I have been legally orphaned (if such a thing is possible at my age) for quite some time.  But as time goes by in this little home town the generation who are regularly passing away now are the parents of the people I went to school with.  The generation I was taught to respect as my elders when I was growing up, and who never lost that implied authority as I joined the work force myself.  Although my relationship grew to be more personal with many of them over time (especially with this fellow, he was always trying to sell the story that he was a grumpy old man when it was so evident he was just the opposite) they never lost that aura that they were older and wiser than me.

I wonder: does their passing bother me most because in the big picture their absence alters the fabric of our community’s life?  Or is the problem much more focussed - am I being forced to understand that as these wise ones go, others will have to step up and fill their shoes.  That would be my generation.  That would be me.  

Does being in the company of parents allow us to feel that we can continue to be followers, not leaders?  Can we still draw comfort that we are the protected ones, not be expected to do the protecting ourselves?  Is that why I feel a little more like an orphan with each and every funeral?  Is that why each of their deaths affects me on a personal level? 

It also has me wondering if it’s a comfort or a curse to spend a whole lifetime living in the same place, surrounded by the same people.  If my life had taken me away from this town would I have connected with people the same way?  Would I have built the kind of relationships with the people I’d met along the way to experience this same sense of loss when they died?  Would losing them leave me feeling slightly orphaned?  Or does it take an entire lifetime to create something so replete?

 I can tell you this, though: as uncomfortable as it is to feel orphaned, I’m kind of glad I’m a home town girl.