A Random Friday Article

this is my article for this Friday's paper...I don't really know what it is about, because I just starting typing and rambled on for awhile...I was anticipating my skin cancer surgery for the next day as I wrote, so I guess I wasn't all there. The farmer got a chuckle out of it, and that's all people really want anyway. Just a light hearted warm fuzzy chuckle. We don't get too many of those in life anymore...



Nothing exciting ever happened to me when I lived in the city. I never saw anything interesting, encountered any peculiar situations, won any contests, and certainly never had anything to write an article or blog about! But now, these opportunities abound in my life and I gotta be honest…it can be tiring.

I love my life and I would not change it in any way, but the dog is always barking. The chickens always need to be fed and their eggs gathered. The cats (and children) seem to be up to constant mischief. The drama surrounding the cow continues to keep me awake at night. The farmer’s work is never done. My 10+ loads of laundry per week never seem to get finished. The dirt being tracked through the house always needs sweeping. There is almost always a situation with rain- either we’ve had too much or not enough. And when the children call my name in a particular way from outside, I find myself debating on whether or not to go hide in my closet because that “particular way” usually means something is really wrong with an animal. And this only happens when I am alone and have to solve the problem drawing on my own (lack of) expertise.

But this is life in the country. And this is life everywhere. Even the simple life is complicated. Even life in the calm, serene countryside can be full of twists and turns. As we anticipate the birth of a calf in the next 10 or so days I am realizing that this will mean even more details to work out in our life. This undertaking of having a family milk cow will be frustrating at times. I’ve always been ready for the fun of it, but am I ready for those frustrations? I hope so, because I can’t even begin to imagine what they may be!

I’m trying not to focus on all the tiresome and endless tasks of living the simple life. I’m trying not to freak out about all the what-ifs surrounding Sweetums’ new baby. Rather, I’m trying to laugh at all the funny things that come my way because of how and where we live. This morning I was wondering what the small foreign object on the grass was that Sweetums was standing over, and if it had something to do with her possibly being in labor-it turns out it was a football one of the kids threw inside the pasture, and no, that doesn’t have anything to do with bovine labor. I’m also trying to savor the beauty of seeing 2 decorated fox hunters atop horseback trotting down my driveway this morning (and then having a good laugh again because their horses were spooked by Sweetums and her motley crew herd of goats chasing them down the fence line and they took off running to get away from that dangerous bunch). These things don’t just happen to anyone, and they certainly never happened to me before I became an official bumpkin.

So I continue to endure the life of a farmer’s wife, out here in the beautiful country, working hard at the simple life and loving every minute of it-the good and the bad.