Growing up in the grasslands of the Palouse, I always
thought I was a farm girl. After all, I was surrounded by wheat and barely
fields, tractors, dirt-covered men and sun-weathered women who wore Osh-Kosh
during the day and tight jeans and cowgirl boots at night. It was only when I
married a farmer that I was told something different.
Around here if you haven’t had farmland in the family for at
least three generations, you’re not really a farmer, or a farm girl. Was that
irritating to me, and does that seem a bit pretentious? Yes, but you have to
look at it from the farmer’s perspective, I guess. Compare it to someone in
from New York or L.A. calling someone from Spokane a “small town” girl. If that
girl from Spokane said something like that to me, being from Tekoa (population
under 800) I would probably spit my Coors Light through my Carmex-smeared and right onto her Prada
bag. Let me tell ya, sista’ a girl from Spokane ain’t no small town girl. Not
to me anyway.
Apparently, that is just how multi-generational farmers feel
about those of us who neighbor around them, but haven’t been in a farm family
for three generations or more. Based on the analogy above, I get that. And I
don’t think it’s pretentious. It’s called pride.
And yet, yesterday, as I was sitting tall in my warm Case IH
tractor cross-harrowing a large flat piece of land, I could not help but feel a
little bit of that old pride when I noticed that my grandfather was doing the
exact same thing in the field across the road from me.
Now, you all are used to my amazing whit and irresistible charm
(let’s face it ladies, I talk about peeing in places you would never admit to –
now that’s charm!) but on this topic I am all serious!
I have listened to The Boss wax nostalgic over the years about
how he remembered the year that his grandfather could no longer get up into the
tractor by himself. That was the year that he died. It sucked for my husband,
but as a multi-generational farmer, it imprinted a memory in his mind of the hardworking, dirt-tilling, family-loving legacy that his grandfather had left, and that
he, himself, tries to live up to.
However, we don’t talk about my grandfather that way. It’s
not allowed. Why? Because I am of the blessed few 39-year-olds who still have
all of their grandparents alive. That’s right. Every one of them.
Heck, up until my son was born, I had my great-grandmother around as an example of how my family lives. That being said, I feel that I need to point out – if you didn’t get that already – that my son had his great-great-grandmother around until he was almost a year old. He still had both of his great-grandmothers and both great-grandfathers. Now that's legacy!
I think that the reason that I always thought of myself as a
farm girl was that my great-great grandfather was a farmer in Idaho, and though
my grandfather who was tilling across from me never farmed the land himself, he was the landlord. So, you see,
I felt like I had dirt under my nails just by association. But, let me tell you
friend, there are 20+ miles between here and Idaho, where my family farmed, so really that history doesn't really count in our neck of the woods.
However, because of that, I spent much of my days wandering through
wheat and barely fields that were worked up by someone else – but owned by my
family – hiking up the mountains that surrounded those fields hunting for Sasquatch
with my mom and grandparents, and swimming in the cat-tail pocked pond that sat
at the edge of those fields.
As a result, my memories of my amazing grandfather have always been
surrounded by farmland. If he didn’t own the land, he worked as a hired man for
someone else. He was -correct that- is a
man with dirt and oil under his fingernails. He is a man of integrity, family
honor, and an amazing amount of love and knowledge about farming and everything else that we ever wanted to know; so when I looked up yesterday and saw that man -my amazing grandfather - sitting in the seat of a John Deere across from me, I once again
felt that swell of pride that comes with being raised on and surrounded by
farmland, by family, and by small town pride.
No, I will never be the son or grandson or a farmer who tills
the same earth as their grandparents, but that does not mean that at some point
I didn’t breathe in enough of that dust that has been stirred up around me, and
my small town, not to feel the land pulsing around me in a simliar way that
they do.
As I told my aunt yesterday, as my grandfather and I went
round and round across from each other oblivious to anything else but the lines we were criss-crossing
around our prospective fields that had been tilled for years by other families, I never in my
life thought that I would be out here farming “with” my grandfather.
"Neither did I," my aunt said. "Neither did I."
I love you Grandpa!
Amy
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