Spring

It has been a cold, wet spring, but now the sun has come out, and with it has come a time of almost feverish activity. You can't drive anywhere without slowing down for tractors so enormous they look more like spaceships than the little pictures of red tractors that appear in children's books. Yesterday, many of them were carrying tillage equipment, like huge, folded wings equipped with curving metal spikes to rake through the soil. Today, before seven in the morning, I saw a tractor hurrying down the road carrying plastic boxes of seed, ready to plant.

My husband left my daughter's orchestra concert early last night to go home and work while there was still daylight. With my ascent, he let my son stay up very late so he could keep working instead of putting him to bed, and when my daughter and I got home from the orchestra concert, we heard wild cries coming from the darkening fields. We looked at each other with horror, thinking that we were hearing unusually chilling coyote howls. My daughter hurriedly shut the outside cats on the back porch to keep them safe. It was my son howling. He had bit into an apple and wrenched loose one of his baby teeth way past his bedtime, and then run outside into the field to find his father. We could not see him in the dark.

The combination of my pregnancy, the weather, and equipment failure has left us awed by the amount of work we have to do -- even though we are not planting row crops. Most of the chicken work is apparently off-limits for me because of concerns about germs during my pregnancy, and I have still not learned how to operate the tractor with confidence, so far too much of this work is falling on my husband who is working more than full-time at his teaching job.

I am taking two lessons away from this time. First, I need to be pushier and willing to make more mistakes so that I can be a more active partner in this farm. There is no reason why I should not be driving that tractor as well as my husband is by this time. Second, we have been included in this wild and beautiful rhythm of working with the land, at least partially. I'm so grateful for that.