Watch Out, that might getcha

March Chores

In the brisk March air, my kids and I decided to do the morning chores while my husband loaded out a hay customer.  A breeze came steadily from the north.  That is the cold kind that makes any chore more difficult.  With the sharp chill comes clear skies and air though, so we could vividly see the top of the loader of the small tractor a quarter mile down our driveway.  That tractor has been our bread and butter of the farm, keeping us ready for any dilemma that presents itself, as for us though, we were watering.

I looked down on my kids dressed just in the nines.  My son did indeed decided to wear a hat that I continued to put on for him after he kept taking it off. How he got it off while wearing mittens that I insisted upon is beyond me.  My daughter agreed to wear her water-proof muck boots and opted for a wildrag instead of a hat, but then only after feeling the cutting wind, asked for a hat too.

Being Prepared

I reminded her how she didn’t want a hat and that she wasn’t about to take her brother’s.  I gave her the whole spiel about being prepared for any circumstances and that she would have to be more responsible next time.   As a mother, I knew I should have been more prepared for… well March.  It looked beautiful, and I barely put on a coat myself.  So there we were, discussing the merits of planning for the weather and apologizing for my negligence, when she had a revelation.  She had her cheetah hat!  She’d remembered leaving it in the back of the farm ‘Hoe.  I opened the door like opening a treasure chest.  There was not just the cheetah hat but also another hat that belonged to the baby!  It was like the hat mobile!

With ears and fingers appropriately covered, the three of us were ready to water the cows.  I’ve been working on teaching them which knob starts the well and that the wire of the electric fence is “hot.”  I figure if they have fingers to turn knobs and legs to walk into fences, it is never too early to teach them about it all.  My daughter and I moved the soft hose into a wide arc so that the water would run through it and not build up pressure in a kink.  Then I reminded her that the soft hose needed to be clipped into the hard hose or the water would come spraying out.  She clipped it in with a kind of zeal I’ve never had for doing chores, especially ones where my wet fingers might stick to frozen metal.  Finally, I showed her again how to tie a square knot around the hose in order to keep the hard hose connected to the soft hose on the ground, go over the wall of the tank and stay submerged.  To add to the confusion for her, as if all this weren’t enough to make her little brain explode, I showed her that if I left a tail on the square knot, it would be easy to untie it when we were done watering and that would in turn get us done sooner to go see dad in the tractor.  

She finally pressed “start” and the air filled the hose.  I reminded her that we stay back from the control panel, the well’s spout and the hose itself just in case something could go wrong.  The water finally came on, and if I could have had some suspense-building music playing, I might have seen what was about to happen.  The pressure being strong enough plus the hard hose being angled just enough divided by the slack in the knot equaled a geyser right here in Hoyt!  

Problem-Solving

She shrunk in surprise or fear or both, so I had to remind her that the water needed to be contained or we would get stuck in a whole lot of mud.  We went together to reign in the hard hose, pull the slip knot on the baling twine, and get the water flowing back in the tank.  Her boots kept her feet dry in the puddle, her hat kept her hair dry in the shower of well water, and the clips and knots saved us from a much bigger mess.  Every little piece of the equation was perfect for us to be prepared for the mishap.  They’re bound to happen, they just are.  No matter how many times we, as in I, plan ahead and try to ensure smooth operations, the best thing we can do is prepare for the mishaps.  My husband’s favorite saying is, “The best plan is no plan” which grates against all my organizational skills, but its meaning coming to fruition is more about problem solving for the sticky situations that you can’t and don’t plan on happening and still finding a way to be successful in spite of them.

Once all the spraying was over, the hose was drained, the knob returned to neutral, and both kids’ muddy boots were back in the vehicle, we went to see dad who was none the wiser.  The client drove off, the loader was returned to the ground, and cows were watered.  Even a mundane chore like watering presents its own mishaps to which a formulaic plan does little more than make the resolution just a little easier to solve, but my husband was none the wiser.