The Farmer’s Wife

My daughter gets married today.  She’s really doing it.  I am so happy for her.  I truly am happy.  I’m not nervous, I’m not anxious.  I’m tired.  But happy.  This is the next step in her life and it’s all she’s ever wanted, to be a farmer’s wife.

I tease her that she should have learned from my mistakes.  You see, I married a farmer.  But this part of my life has not been a mistake.  Not one day of it has been wrong.  It might not have been what I always wanted but it has been the best my life could ever expect to be.

I wasn’t born on a farm.  I wasn’t raised on a farm, like she was.  I came by choice.  It seems that I fell in love with a farmer.  And since then, as I have watched others fall in love with farmers, I have come to realize that loving a farmer is one of the easiest things to do.  And one of the hardest.

The life of a farmer is pretty simple, or so you think.  But, there is stress beyond words.  What if there’s not enough rain?  What if there’s too much rain?  What happens if prices go up?  What happens if prices go down?  What happens if prices bottom out?  Stress.

There is more work to do than can ever get done.  Most farmers work from sunup to sundown.  A lot go to work before sunup and are still at it way past sundown.  It’s their life.  They do find time to rest.  I have caught my husband in the house for a couple of hours in the heat of the day watching soap operas.  But that’s because it’s too hot to be cutting tobacco.  He’s back at it later in the day when it starts to cool off.  And on those days he’s still in the field at dark.

And as she has always known, if you marry a dairy farmer those cows have to be milked every day, twice a day.  Sometimes you get time off.  Sometimes you can get someone to milk for you.  But most of the time you have to stay home.  But if you do get time off, most of those vacations  coincide with dairy shows or farm machinery shows or other work-related events.  And most of those aren’t held at the beach.  And usually you have cows to take care of while you’re there.  And when you get back to the farm the first thing you have to do is to check on the cows or the crops or what other neighbors are doing.

And as a farmer’s wife, you do have to work all the time.  You have to help him when he needs the help.  Sometimes you have to help him in order to see him, to spend some time with him.  I remember lots of nights riding on the bumper of the tractor in order to catch up with my husband.  But you also have to keep the house up and keep him fed.  When the kids come you are the one who has to make sure they are taken care of.  He’ll be great throughout the day to spend time with them but when harvest time comes around or milking needs to be done then it’s all up to the farmer’s wife.  And most farmer’s wives work a “public” job.  That helps with the bills and the health insurance and that type of thing.  It’s a lot of work.

But the benefits can’t be denied.  I can’t imagine living anywhere but in the country.  You can breathe in the country.  Your next door neighbor may be 1/2 mile down the road.  It’s as close to living outside as you can get.  You fall in love with the sun and the stars and the sky.  You marvel at how many colors of green you can see in a landscape that is painted for you differently every day.  You fall in love with every barn cat, farm dog, cow or horse or goat or sheep that calls your place home.  Even though you might not be with them day in or day out they are still yours and you feel over-protective of them because they share that farmer with you.

There is always the stress and the work but for a farmer, and his wife, the stress seems to work itself out.  The work sometimes turns into fun but rarely is a burden.

There is an old adage that says “a son is a son until he takes a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all of her life”.  In the case of my daughter I know that is true.  She cannot deny that I am her mother, as I cannot deny that I raised her.  She is so much like me it’s scary.  So I know that she will always be mine.  I also know that a farmer lives on his land.  It’s very rare to find a farmer who will leave his land to move somewhere else.  I don’t expect my new son to ever leave his farm, it’s as much a part of him as my daughter will be.  That land runs through his veins as strong as his blood runs through his veins.  So I accept that my daughter will live 4 hours from home.  But knowing her, and her love of the land and the love of the way of life in which she was raised I know that she will love that land as though she was born there.  I also know that she left home when she went away to college and I knew that she would probably not move back.  But knowing my girl, I know that she takes a large part of “home” with her wherever she goes.  And even though she may become a Jericho Acres girl, she’ll always be a Fancy Farmer, a farmer’s daughter.

And now a Farmer’s Wife.