A Damn-it Kind of Day

Bad Days

Maybe it is just Mondays, call it getting out of the bed on the wrong side, or it happens every Friday the 13th, but we all have bad days.  What gives us comfort is knowing that a day doesn’t last forever.  We get through our stubbing of toes, running out of toilet paper, and throwing an eggshell into the trash only to have it splash off of a milk carton and like a little waterfall, spill and splatter onto the floor, leaving a nice sticky puddle to be cleaned.  

We can all handle little “damnit” days, but can we take that mentality back to the farm where everything is amplified and intensified?

A bad day in town is an entire bad season on the farm.  A stubbed toe or bumped funny bone in town equates to standing up too fast and scraping your spine on a square edge of metal or slamming a thumb between a hammer and it’s recipient.  More than once, I’ve walked my big forehead right into a lever on our squeeze chute, leaving a welt and some purpling.  

Likewise, not planning well and running out of household staples sets a suburbanite back an hour while she runs to the store.  The country counterpart is making-do with cloth rags instead of paper products and re-purposing lots of kitchen utensils into shop tools.  And who hasn’t found themselves jimmy-rigging machinery to the point that you look like the guy on the warning sign?  A few months ago, we were using a square sump-pump balanced 6’ up on top of a round nursery tank, fighting slippery ice on top and frozen ice in the valve so that we could water our cows. To have been recording the sight from the house would have gone viral!

But the worst offender of a bad day on the small scale are those little acts of fate that let you know God has a sense of humor at our expense.  It really can be comical from the outside like when you carefully take a drink and the rim of the cup still dribbles right onto your white shirt.  There is nothing you did wrong, and nothing you can do to fix it.  An equivalent is new or relatively new hoses leaking on a tractor or other implement.  There is nothing more frustrating that digging through dirt-crusted hydraulic fluid to find where all the mess is coming from for no reason at all.

The Splashback

We all know that ripple effect when things go wrong which is how the new sprayer ended up laying on it’s back.  The tractor broke down and was leaking everywhere.  We had estimations coming in over $10,000 for … leaking. Cause unknown but thought to be the hydraulic pump, and it was just leaking.  Because the hydraulics couldn’t close the booms, they had to stay open.  Because they were wide open, the wind was able to get some backside lift, use the weight on the butt end, and tip the whole thing up.  When things go wrong, we tend to think there is a cosmic game of dominos happening to us and quite literally to our livelihood, where one misfortune leads to the next-- all beyond our control.

Then, just at the moment you throw up your hands and slam the towel to the ground because chaos seems to be winning the monumental battle, everything is going wrong on an epic scale, the entire spring has been the pits, you finally decide to do chores and call it a day, and a leaf of hay bounces right into the mud splashing back onto your pants.  You laugh.

You Laugh

 You laugh because big or small, things will go wrong for a day or an entire season.  Whether it be the leaky faucet on the bathroom sink or the leaky well head in the field, puddles will form, and they are funny.  So, find some humor even in the worst of cases--  Even in the most expensive of cases--  Even in the ironic, irreparable, and sometimes most devastating of cases.  Try to laugh.  The minute you chalk it up to a damn-it kind of day and surrender to it, the powers that be will relent.  Puddles will dry, bruises will heal, time will allocate itself for cleaning and repairs.  Things will always work themselves out and reward you in finding a hydraulic pump repair is only a hose, and a dribble on a tee shirt will dry.  They just do.