Notes from an Aspiring Farmwife

Journal Entry #1

When I married this man of mine, I knew three things about him. I knew that I loved him more intensely than ought to be allowed, I knew that sharing in his life would make me a better person, and I knew that if I married him I was destined to either be a pastors wife or a farmers' wife.

He never became a pastor, though he easily could, and instead has become a well-respected layperson whose opinions and feedback people value and seek out and whose input only help grow the church. He is filled with Light, even without a podium.

Farming has often been his occupation, in one form or another-but always working on other peoples' farms. Most recently, working more as a computer geek FOR farmers but he has spent many years knee deep in manure and elbows in cow places you just don't mention. Through it all, my competition will always be the land. You can take a boy from the country, but you can't take the country from the boy. Instead, husbandry is his way of life. As surely as the blood in his veins, farming courses through him and is his lifeblood.

Cows really did jump over the moon when the boychild dreamed and it was counting the cows he would one day milk that lulled the boy to sleep at night. A dairy farm of his own was sketched countless times in his journal with himself being depicted as a brawny muscleman. (You can imagine the chuckles I had when I happened upon those daydream journals.) This dream continued well into manhood, though eventually it changed its course a little. Instead of a large-herd dairy farm that filled his dreams in his younger years, the husband-man envisioned something on a smaller scale. Something that maybe didn't include JUST cows.

And I, his devoted lover, was up to any challenge that would have me to share in his life despite the fact that I knew nothing of farming. When my chubby arms and legs hardly kept me upright, we lived in what seemed to my small mind, in the middle of nowhere and my siblings raised goats for 4H. I remember the big goat butting me more often than not. When my knees turned knobbly and awkward, and we had moved to a less country, though still small town home, we had a rabbit. I don't remember if she was mine but I remember going out to the barn and cleaning the hutch often enough. As long as I can remember, we always had a dog. Big beautiful dogs that would live indoors and follow us outdoors just as often. In my formative years, we moved to a city house with a yard even smaller than the barn our old house sported. Those years still included a dog, but this time a small, persnickety poodle who loved nothing more than to sit on the couch and suck his back paw all day and the occasional cat, including my very own Siamese who lives to this day. (Old geezer.) And that was the extent of my non-existent farming expertise.

Somewhere around college-age, my hormones got the best of me (I guess) and, out of the blue, I began to show signs of allergies: specifically, cow dander.

I knew nothing of farming, would tear up and sneeze every time I visited the farm, and couldn't stop the tears at the tragic death of animals-even fictional ones. Farm boy falls for the wrong girl-the title of our Love Story would read, but I am so glad he did.

It would be a wild ride, I knew....and has proven to be.

Our dreams aren't realized just yet, (we don't even have a place to call our own!) but the big dreams are made up of little, every day dreams and everyday learning and everyday preparations for when those big dreams will eventually come. We are gathering extra oil; we are preparing for big dreams to come true and thanking God for the little dreams that already have.

Someday, Lord willing, it will be my mouth, like Grams, that nonchalantly captivates children with stories of chickens running headless through the yard and the telling of ornery cow antics. Someday, serving up a golden chicken for Sunday dinner that didn't start out first in plastic wrap will be just how things were and having ground beef that first hung in the barn would be as common as an evening of crochet and C.S. Lewis. And the many years of hanging clothes on the line might dull the memory of first learning the best way to hang them. Eating the biscuits that took years to perfect may force out the memories of those first hockeypucks that came from the oven. The jars of bottled summer, will have been so practiced that gone the memory will be of the days when jars exploded in the canner because of a foolhardy young farmwife who was trying her best at pretending.

So I write. I take note. I am not yet what I hope to be, but when I eventually get there, I hope I don't forget the joy the journey brought me.

(a new series....)