Fields of Green Turned Gold

Harvest is beautiful in photos.  It is orange moons and fainting sunsets.  It is also golden fields and green tractors; well, they should be green.

Unfortunately, harvest is not just the aesthetics of frost on fields.  Harvest is the frost on the truck windshield which you have to scrape off to drive to the load-out field before the first truck.

Harvest is chaos of noise from two tractors and an auger, and a truck driver holding a conversation with my dad above the rest of it.  But it is also rolling up polywire fence for the livestock and hearing the soft hum of the combine across the section.

Harvest is wearing four layers for the 6:30 AM truck, and a wearing a t-shirt by the 4:30 PM load.  It is keeping my hair up in a hat and still brushing out corn chaff that night.  The evil, pink glitter gets everywhere, including the pockets of nearly every sweatshirt I own.

Harvest is taking food out to the fields during the day, and eating supper late.  To make the first part of this operation work as smoothly as possible, we have a map on the wall by our fridge on which each field is numbered.  Snacks and coffee to field 14 it is.

Speaking of coffee, harvest is not the time to bring up the coffee consumption of those special few running the equipment.  The number of beat-up thermoses you've poured in the past twelve hours might be high, but I promise you- they don't care.  They're running on caffeine and ever-present fear of bad weather or breakdowns (because, you know, those two things can never come at the same time).
Give them coffee.
Say nothing.

Harvest transcends all other schedules.  For instance, I had homework to do this week, but I did none of it when we were loading trucks.  This makes for a slightly-stressed me, but I had the least amount of farm work in our family this fall, so I don't worry too much.  For the record, the homework is done, for now anyways.

Harvest, however, is not.

- Grace

My Spirit Animal is a Chicken

Somewhere between the early bird and the night owl on the avian sleep scale is the lowly barnyard hen.  There are no poems about her, no sayings using her sleep schedule as motivation to wake up earlier, or work later into the evening.

The hen isn't up before dawn with the sole intention to chase worms, or staying out after dark to prey on night crawlers. She's too far down on the food chain for that nonsense.

No, the chicken has her own routine:

She wakes up, jumps down from her roost, and eventually makes her way to the nests, where she lays her (almost) daily egg.  The rest of the day she is eating, drinking, being pestered by our one-year-old border collie/heeler mix, scratching the seeds out of my garden, looking for bugs, or whatever else her tiny heart desires.  As the sun goes down, the chicken will make her way back to the hen house along with the rest, and by dark she will be sitting comfortably on her roost.  The next day is like the one before it.

I appreciate the chicken's way of life:
Eat when hungry.
Sleep when it's dark.
Lay an egg most every day.
Sing when happy.
Chase insects because it's fun.
Run from danger.
Let the world know when you're distressed by making obnoxious noise until something is done about it.

I think I've found my spirit fowl.

So, I will take the unspoken advice of the barnyard hen.
I will follow my daily routine because it is useful to me,
and beneficial to the whole,
however simple or repetitive it may seem.

"It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life." - J.R.R. Tolkien

- Grace