Tales from the key drive

Here is yet another Farm Side from 2001. Seems I have to spend the milk check this morning. And Alan did get to read Last of the Breed in study hall after I had a long, intense (very intense) visit with his well-meaning, but very young teacher.

It was one of those days. First the car wouldn’t start so the kids had to walk to the bus. Horrors. All the way down that long, winding driveway with no warm car, no radio, no mother to referee their tribal warfare. I’ll bet they were permanently scarred. Because the car wouldn’t start I had to go right back over to the barn to finish milking and cleaning up instead of sloping off to Fultonville to “move”. We are, of course, still moving and probably will be for the next fifty years or so. Most days I go to town after the bus leaves and pack still more of my hundreds of books into cardboard cartons from the liquor store. This is a big improvement over scraping cow deposits off concrete if you catch my drift. Anyhow, the mood I was in when I got the call from school was not pretty. Especially since, after we pushed the car across the yard to get it out of the way of a truck bringing in concrete, it started just fine.

A stern voice informed me that one of my evil little brats had failed to bring a swimsuit for gym. Three times. I was horrified. That kind of malfeasance ranks right up there with armed robbery in my book. I pointed out (obviously wrongly); that I didn’t think that this was such a terrible thing. Swimming is supposed to be fun. Let the little wrongdoer sit on the bench and watch her buddies a couple of times and I’ll bet she’ll remember the suit next time. No such luck-she is going to be serving detention, and after school detention at that, for her outrageous transgression.

I had to laugh. What a truly horrible punishment for a farm kid. Staying after school. Wow, she won’t have time to water the horses or feed the sheep or turn out cows if she gets home late enough. Somebody else will do her chores for her and she’ll be forced to just sit there and read. Wanna bet that she forgets her swimsuit more often after this?

Same day. Two hours later. Another of my little monsters came home with the news that he will also be serving detention-the kinder, gentler, lunch commons kind, for bringing the wrong book to study hall. This is the kid we have been trying to convince to read for years. He rolled through most of Gary Paulsen’s survival and adventure stories like a rocket sled. Then nothing appealed to him until he stumbled across a Louis L’Amour novel that I had recently moved. It was a big, thick grownup book about the former Soviet Union. I rejoiced to find him reading it in bed instead of coming when I called him for supper. He hadn’t even heard me.

When he was punished for reading that same book, I was outraged. I called the school and demanded an explanation. I was informed that although reading in study hall was ok, specific books were required. He’d forgotten his.

And after all the school is trying to teach children about real life. What would happen if they grew up and went to a meeting and forgot an important paper? I pointed out that we were talking eleven-year-old here, not Bill Gates, but I guess he’d better start planning his corporate future. I became a little crazy.

Real life.

Come on, this kid lives on a farm. They don’t make life any realer than that.

Kids growing up on farms are smack dab in the middle of real life. They see it all from birth to death. Birth isn’t some sanitized Bambi scene on a made for TV movie. It’s pain and blood and triumph and tragedy. Real life, right there in living color.

Everyone on a farm is involved in the process of life. Mistakes have real consequences far beyond eating lunch in the detention room, for death stalks the barns and pastures as well. If you have a hundred or so domestic animals in your world, not to mention thousands of wild ones, some of them, sometimes, will die. And they don’t go away to Tarzan’s elephant graveyard for a tidy, sanitized little secret death either, they do it right there in front of you, sometimes right in your hands. This summer one of the kids’ calves was born with a congenital defect and choked on her milk and died right there in the barn aisle at feeding time. There were plenty of tears and sadness, but the rest of the calves still had to be fed, so everyone, children included, picked up the pieces and went on.

Old cows die too, or are sold. Coyotes eat the barn cats. Sometimes they eat calves too and chickens, bunnies or anything they can find. That’s real life. Unfortunate, but real.

Our kids are a part of our business as well. When times are rough they know it. When things go well they share in the joy. Their help is important to us and they know that too. If a farm kid forgets to water the horses, then somebody has to go out with a flashlight, couple up the hoses and do it in the dark. If they serve detention and get home late, then someone else feeds their dog or hauls a wheelbarrow of hay to the sheep. My terrible little book-forgetting boy sits down with me when I’m doing the farm bookkeeping and writes checks, addresses envelopes and posts the checks on the computer. He drives the skid steer better than I do. I suspect that these activities will get him ready for real life in a way that in-school punishment never could.

It’s an everyday thing for a farm family. Our life, you might say.

And it’s a meaningful life too. Full and rich and satisfying.

My farm kids may forget to bring their swimsuits to important meetings or take the wrong book to the pool, but they’ll do the real stuff well-they always have.