I can't believe it is "that time of the year" again! Time for school clothes shopping, harvest, canning, baking, preparing for fall sports, the Palouse Empire Fair, and of course...time for my husband to turn back into THE BOSS!
For those of you who are new to this blog, or have simply forgotten because it has been so long since I have blogged about my life, I will tell you that I am a writer, mother of five children, volunteer librarian for the Oakesdale Grade School, one of the assistant coaches for our new AwEsOmE Cross Country Team, farm wife, and of course unpaid hired hand to the man who is my husband for all but three seasons of the year : Spring Work, Harvest, and Fall Work. We are now about to enter Harvest, at which time the man who has been my best friend, my husband, my ally, and my confidant will turn back into THE BOSS!
The hardest thing about Harvest for me is morphing from wife into employee - especially when your a pro-bono employee. The job of a farm wife is simple; make lunches in the morning for 2-3 people, get breakfast for the kids, clean the house, run for parts, move equipment, run kids to the pool, find time to transport kids to school shopping and fall sports practices, run drinks out if someone forgets to grab enough, drive 30 miles for more parts, make lunch for kids, clean up again, do laundry, mow the lawn or weed flower gardens, water the lawn, help kids work their animals because the fair is looming (YEAH!!), move more equipment, try and can a fruit two, or freeze veggies, get dinner going, oh crap! kids need picked up from the pool, serve dinner to the kiddos, and then be ready to listen to the events of the day while The Boss showers and eats dinner. And that's just one day.
It doesn't look that bad in writing, and if it is done right, it isn't that bad. It's the things you don't plan for that get you. Accidentally running out of bread, running out of water like last year, break downs, kids getting sick, having a lawn mower break down and having to decide whether to tell The Boss and have him out working on it at 11 at night when he should be sleeping, or just letting the lawn grown a foot tall and see if anyone notices. Harvest is not a gentle rhythm, it is a constant drum beat that only speeds up and gets louder and more chaotic until all of a sudden, someone tells you to STOP! It's over. And you have been so busy you didn't even know it.
My husband and I have been doing this together for ten years and in that time I have cried, yelled, screamed, cried some more, ran over his lunch box with the farm truck innumerable times in one sitting when he complained about something that I can no longer remember, and even told him to Go explicative himself, on the radio where three other farm families and all of our hired hands were listening, simply because he didn't say thank you.
However, I have always made him a lunch, always fed him his dinner, and even laid out his towel and sweats in a candle lit bathroom as a way of saying, "I'm sorry for over-reacting to you being an insensitive, over stressed monster today who never tells me thank you for all of the hard work I do from 6 AM to 10 PM and for forgetting to telling me you love me for four weeks ever season. Clearly I was out of line. My bad."
Often it takes my mother-in-law who is an ex-farm wife herself, my father, an ex-farmer, my father-in-law, and my mother, all of who farmed as well, to keep me cooking with the frying pans instead of beating The Boss over the head with it. They all remind me, depending on which on I call, that ALL farmers all like this - and especially one whose harvest is the sole support for six people and three employees. They have to remind me that come late September or early October he will look up again and smile and hug me and say, "Wow, we did it again! We made it! Thanks for the help." Who me?
This year however, The Boss decided to take a pre-emptive strike. Last week he took me out to dinner and a movie, took me camping alone, has texted me to tell me he misses me - and that man hates texting, and went shopping with me to help me get prepared for harvest cooking so that I will not be so stressed out. At the end of all of that, I said, "Are you just doing this so that I will be nice to you this harvest when you are so caught up in work that you forget all about me and how hard I am working too?"
He put his arm around me and got a sly smile on his face and said, "No (good answer), but it sure would be a bonus if you were nice."
Okay...I promise I will be nice...cross my heart!
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