A few weeks ago, I was aware that I am ignorant of so many things about life in the country. So, feeling a real need, I asked the Lord of all help if I could find a mentor, and I wanted it to be a relationship not a professional consultancy.
As I find is the case so often with prayer, I did not immediately see when it had been answered. But my fence-guy recommended a neighbour to help us with building our walk-in shed for livestock. I wasn’t exactly pleased: I had wanted the fence-guy to do it for us.
But it turns out that the neighbour owns the needed equipment, has lived here all his life and knows absolutely everything about not just his property but ours too. (He watched as they put our septic system in years ago.) He is ingenious, and he works hard, maybe too hard - both Christmas and New Years day! And, best of all, he is very, very patient with my many limitations. What I had first experienced as a disappointment was the very thing I had asked for. (There’s a lesson in there somewhere.)
The next thing to know about life in the country is that there is weather and there are seasons. Winter used to mean I needed a jacket as I ran from the Fiat into the church office, or that my friends might be off somewhere skiing. In Madison County, by contrast, everything revolves around the reality of rain and temperature and hours of daylight. Mostly, however, winter now means mud. Epic amounts of mud. So, one learns patience along with the need for work. We stuck the pickup with a load of gravel. My mentor rode his ATV home to get his air-compressor. (This next part could be turned into that song, if you remember it, about “I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.”) The air-compressor was to pump up the flat tire on the John Deere tractor. The John Deere needed to go over and jump start the ancient Massey-Ferguson front-end loader which is a cold-blooded beast of a machine. The front-end loader was strong enough to pull the pickup out of the mud. And my mentor was patient at every step. It’s life on a farm: nothing goes quite to plan; nothing’s really easy; it’s nothing to complain about. Nobody’s being heroic.
Two last observations:
Out here, after a job is done, you talk to each other. Not anything very profound, but Chryse and I are having to leave the hurry of Google Calendar behind. You take the time to talk unhurriedly, but the one thing you never talk about is how hard the job was you just finished together. That would be seen as very bad form.
Last thing. A friend gave us some nest-eggs. These are ceramic ‘eggs’ that you put in the coop to boost the idea among the hens that this is where you lay the eggs, not under the bushes. I had never used them before. So, on the next to the last day of the year I opened the coop and saw a nest-egg had been moved, and I had to ask myself,
“How in the world could a hen pick up a ceramic egg and move it up to the level of their perch?”
And then it dawned on me: it was an actual egg, and there were two more than the nest-eggs I had put out. The chicks that we bought a Tractor Supply back in July when no larger than puff-balls are now in production!
