People sometimes ask me what it is that I do all day. To be honest, I’d like to know myself. Whatever it is, I’m sure not getting it done, that much I know. Still, I wonder what people imagine I’m up to when they ask that question. Reading paperback mysteries? Sipping iced lemonade under the maple tree? Cleaning my sink faucets with toothbrushes until they sparkle? If that’s the case, I sure as heck want to be doing whatever it is they think I’m doing.
When the kids were all little and I was wading around the house knee-deep in building blocks, John Deere tractors and toy horses, I think my mom and my VON (very organized neighbor) had high hopes for me. They really believed I’d be able to find my floor and get the laundry room hay free once and for all after the kids were all in school. Well, bulletin to the neighborhood: The kids are all in school, and the last of them has been there for eight years. As I look around me, I see three 4-H projects strewn across the table, a kitchen sink full of Swiss chard and earwigs, and piles of paperwork crowding out all the office space. I’m wondering if I somehow missed a class on how to live right.
So, I’ve decided to write out a schedule of what I do on an average day here on Coleman Farms – just an average day. If nothing else, I can hand people an itinerary of what they can reasonably expect of me. First off, though, I suppose I need to weed out all the not average days. The non-average days take up plenty of time, but how in the world can you organize or plan for them? Take canning for example. From July to October, there are days (and around August and September whole weeks) when I am not doing anything but swearing at the gods of the harvest, shoving beans into jars and corn into bags, and boiling water into a state of fury. I’m not sure how we live during those days, who is cooking dinner, who is doing laundry or who is writing articles for magazines. All I know is that the last thing I want to hear is the doorbell ring.
Of course, canning implies we have a garden, and we do. I can’t in all good conscience put the garden on my list of everyday activities, though, because I don’t so much keep a garden as resuscitate a garden. About once every three weeks, when the wild geranium almost completely crowds out the cucumbers and the kochia rises higher than the corn, I lead the kids in a full-out frontal attack to save the vegetables from toppling over the brink. We had a friend visit several months back, who looked out our back window and saw the confusion we optimistically call the garden and said, “You know, most farmers I know don’t keep gardens. They don’t have the time.” How did I miss that memo? Why isn’t that little tidbit taught in FFA classes? Still, I’m not sure our farm qualifies for garden exemption status. It’s big enough that Dave doesn’t have time to garden, but not so big that I can’t.
What I don’t need is my friends who are master gardeners to tell me that if I would make gardening a daily event, it wouldn’t have to take me 24 hours to weed two rows of peas. I already know that. The same principle applies to my fridge, the pantry, the windows, the lawn, the taxes – if I’d just keep to a regular schedule and do daily maintenance on everything that needs to be done around here, this place would be a new world – a garden of Eden, a weed-free zone. But it’s the unexpected events that trip me up.
Take for example the chickens. We’re down to five chickens right now, but they are as committed to eating up the garden as our whole flock ever was. I try to keep them well fed and contained, but they are feathered Houdinis; I’ll swear to it. It doesn’t help that the dogs keep sneaking into the coop to steal their food. As always, their canine incursion liberates all the chickens, who are already highly motivated to be free range, and they eat all my strawberries, top all the corn and dig up all the weed barrier. Now I need to fix about three holes in the coop fence. I’m going to fix them with 7 miles of chicken wire, believe you me. But first I need to feed those rangy dogs, who think they are starving to death. That shouldn’t be so hard, but, of course, it is because the new kitten my daughter found abandoned in a paper lunch bag has decided the dog food is actually her kitty litter, so the dogs won’t eat it.
First thing this morning, I’m going to dump out the dog food – and the cat food too, as it turns out (darn that cat) – and buy more when I pick up the chicken wire, but before I can go to the store, I need to rescue the girls who are overfeeding steers. One of their bike tires has gone flat, probably punctured by the goathead that I’ve been meaning to spray or at least have been meaning to badger David into spraying. But I wanted to use the sprayer first to get some iron on the raspberries and beans.
Meanwhile, I have 4-H kids coming over in an hour to learn how to make wheat bread, and I really don’t want them to see the same laundry moldering on the floor that was there the last time they were over. Somewhere between finding the wheat bucket and wiping off the table, I hope to squeeze in a minute to pay the feed bill before the mail is picked up. If we eat dinner before 10 p.m., whatever miracle of hamburger and zucchini that is going to be, I’m rewarding myself with a modest 10-gallon bucket of ice cream. With homemade chocolate sauce. That will put me in a right good mood, and then I’ll be able to write down my list of what it is I do all day.
Unless I’ve forgotten to switch the laundry again.
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