I can’t feel my legs. I’m rubbing windblown dirt out of my eyebrows. My neck and cheeks are sunburned. My hair has mats in it, and my arms are all chaffed from my shirt... But I feel amazing! A rancher must love to work, sometimes alone and sometimes with others. I looked forward to corral building all winter, knowing that it would be a few very long days with my husband, possibly in the warm sun, lifting and moving panels, and driving the tractor. I knew sometimes my main job would be to “hold this,” and I knew some of our best laid plans might go awry. What I didn’t know is that we would progress through all these levels of teamwork every step of the way.
Companionship
The first level of helping do anything is first knowing you aren’t welcome, aren’t capable, or aren’t needed to help. My husband cut 30 drill stems to make 80-some 8 ft pipes to be our corral’s posts. He found time to do this while I attended to other responsibilities like baby bedtime, making dinner, or just flat out working as a teacher. Once I offered to do the cutting while he went to get the post pounder, and though I felt like I was met with a pat on the head, my husband reminded me that sometimes just my company is all he really wants. As a family, we all made the 2 ½ hour round trip to pick up the post pounder. For as many memories I have of working, I have another equal set of recollections sitting next to Wyatt while he worked. If I’m a real go-getter, I will hand him a screwdriver or plug in an air compressor, but sometimes we sit in silence. Other times, we discuss plans and do some figuring.
Opinions
“Doing some figuring” has worked its way into our household lexicon. If Next Summer Farm and Ranch ever had a motto, that would be it. This time in particular, Wyatt figured all the dimensions for the corrals, figured the cost, figured the time frame, and my job… offer opinion. Which way a gate should swing or how close or far apart to set an alley were planned ahead of time on notebook paper, but even when we were out working, we made decisions on the best way to stack the fifty pound panels and how to maneuver the tractor into awkward places.
Parallel Play
Sometimes that tractor driving gets me flustered. While my husband has made a living in and out of tractors, when we’re together, I’m usually the one in the tractor. One might brush it off as the easier job because the operator is sitting in a cab, but think again! I climbed in and out of the tractor twice for every post pounded! Almost two hundred times of crawling in, setting the gears, pulling forward, pulling the break, hunching over climbing back out, walking around the tractor and pounder, and handing him an attachment. Though the most repetitive and tiring, I like this type of helping because even though we are working together to accomplish a task, I get to do most of the work independently. Getting micromanaged or feeling like I’m incapable breaks my spirit pretty darn quick. I know what I can do and take pride in being more than just a farmer’s wife, watching from the windows.
Divide and Conquer
That Miss Independence mentality serves me well when my husband is busy working on one task, and I take it upon myself to start the next. After I would hand-clean that 30lb attachment to our chest level, I’d retrieve a panel from as far as 50 ft away. At first, I’d balance it on my back, shoulders and tailbone taking the weight while my arms laced through the rungs to hold it steady. If I were closer, within 20 ft or so, I’d carry it upright, depending on my arms to lift the weight and drag what I couldn’t lift. We had quite the trail in the dirt from back ends of panels being dragged around all day! I’d get all of this done while he finished running the hydraulics on the post pounder. While one would think hauling that panel would be easier together, it takes a measure of synergy to move it comfortably and not bang the bottom into shins or let it get top heavy and burdensome on arms and chests. Being the guy in the back is always awkward, waddling with the panel between legs. Sometimes it is just easier to do work alone at two separate tasks before coming together.
Teamwork
Once I’d get close enough to Wyatt with the panel, he would set back the pounder with about 4 different levers, grab the male end of the panel, hook it into the existing female end while I lifted the back side to make the hook up easier. When either of us is stubborn, we try to set the panels alone and neither of us is as successful or move as quickly as when we work together. After every hook up, we’d work together to sling the panel into place, slamming it against the post-- a little moment of completion.
When we were young, I thought we’d do every chore in that symbiotic kind of way. Every thing will go twice as fast! I thought. How wrong I was. There are some responsibilities that are best done alone because they don’t go any faster when there are two working at it. Other tasks just need assertion and support. The best kinds of chores are exponentially improved and hastened when we work together. Those are the ones that I wait all winter to do and will gladly take a sunburn for! The chance to work side by side in partnership with my husband reaffirms my love for him and for our responsibilities as a couple and as ranchers.
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