Officially A Farmer's Wife

 
I handed George his steaming coffee, swept Hannah onto my hip, grabbed my cup of Joe and headed out the door behind George. We were heading out for a sweet Sunday morning stroll around the farm.

The gardens are bursting with greens and squash and beans and lettuce, the sweet baby pigs are quite entertaining, and it’s October in Florida in the morning – cool, bright, and free from suffocating humidity. It is sweet to be together and take in this place we love.

George mentioned he had a project in mind. He’d like to separate the babies from the mamas. It’s go time for weaning and today’s afternoon schedule posed no threat to this procedure. I didn’t exactly know what this would look like, but stamped my approval on the plan as George walked into the pigpen to change out water and feed.
Hannah was happy in the stroller. I was holding my coffee close breathing in sweet cool air and talking to baby girl and baby pigs.  Suddenly, George grabbed a piglet by the hind legs, lifted it over the fence and held it out to me with directions to place it in a pen 30 yards away.

Well, that was that. We were moving pigs. These piglets are not tiny.  They are dense, muscular, hefty, packed, fifteen pound wiggly squealing creatures that DO NOT WANT TO LEAVE THEIR MAMAS! And, 30 yards isn't close under these circumstances.

The sacred coffee is gone. Holding a squealing piglet upside down is happening. With my arms perpendicular to my body, I start walking. My heart is pounding out of my chest. The squealing breaks the sound barrier I’m sure. George Wilder says it makes him sweat. EXACTLY. I lift it up and over into the new pin and head back just as George swings another one over the fence for me to transport across the yard.
 
Three pigs later, my arms are shaking uncontrollably, I’m out of breath, and I’m covered in mud. Apparently I have not been taking time to work out my pig lifting and moving muscles. 

It’s Sunday. It’s time for church. Right now. I jump in the shower to at least get the mud off my legs, throw on a dress and pull my hair in a clip and put on some fancy earrings to cover it all up and out the door we go. And all of the children were dressed but that is about all I am sure of.

I think George has learned that if I think about things for too long, I rationalize and vacillate and don’t really want to do the scary new different thing. He has also learned that if he just walks me right into it, I’ll do it. I’ll cuss and kick and scream and then love that I did it.

It’s official. I'm a farmer’s wife.

There were no pictures of this episode, but George Wilder and Amelia were moving some later in the day so to give you an idea, here they are.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cattle Are Lowing

Image
We’d waited since February for her to calf. By November 20th, all eyes stayed on mama cow - Trahlyta. Her due date was close and we were more than ready. The waiting wrung our patience.  October was wet and boggy and Trahlyta looked sick. We discovered rotting flesh in her foot. Foot rot set in from standing on soggy ground day after day. George and the children tended to her around the clock as they cleaned out oozing infected sore and cared for her hooves. We’ve had her since she was a few days old. The children raised her. She’s part of our family. And, she’s our first cow to calf. She held the keys to our own dairy supply and to our tender hearts as we watched her stay under the weather. All we could do was wait and make sure she stayed healthy and it wasn’t as easy as we expected. But now, her hooves were healthy and her belly was swollen and we were waiting.  On the morning of the 24th, I rushed to the window at the first day light. Down by the creek, I saw Trahlyta and a red cal
Read more

Love Them. Feed Them. Talk To Them. The Rest Is Icing On The Cake.

Image
We've been homeschooling for ten years. At LEAST once a week I think that homeschooling is the worst possible thing on the planet. I look at my kids and think, "I've got nothin'!" It is scary. It is hard. How many hundreds of times have I called my extremely patient husband and yelled, literally screamed into the phone, "I CAN'T DO THIS!" There was a day, in the middle of a lesson that wasn't going well at all, that I walked out the back door, walked to the pool, jumped in fully clothed and yelled as loud as I could under the water. I got back out of the pool, calmly walked inside, changed my clothes and continued with the day feeling much relieved. George, my husband and biggest cheerleader - also a major part of our homeschooling life, is diligent to walk me off the cliff of homeschool despair. When I feel like I am failing our children, he offers me this morsel... Before I give you his advice, I would like to mention at this poi
Read more

Mother's Day Garden Rescue

Image
At 5 a.m. this morning, I felt a cold breeze brush across my forehead from the window above me. Immediately I remembered we didn’t cover the tomatoes. Or the squash. Or the basil. Or any of the fragile life tender green and growing. Growing because we planted it and because we watered it and because we want it to feed us and because our family has spent countless hours prepping soil, dragging water, and watching the weather closer than the Weather Channel.  There have been five other nights that we remembered to cover the plants in preparation for a coming storm or freeze. We’d already been up in the middle of the night rushing to protect it all as the winds whipped at us. We had found every last bucket and canister and jar that would cover our precious starts. Most of our work felt in vain because we hadn’t had a frost or a wild storm actually do enough damage for the shelters to make a difference... Truth -- I was frustrated because we had covered all the plants the nigh
Read more