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".