Just One Day

Just the other day, I sat looking like a trophy wife, rodeo version, in the Hospitality Tent1 at a rodeo.  My bracelets were jingling as manicured fingers applied a fresh coat of lip gloss.  I ate a salad.  An older woman asked where “we” were from, figuring I was married to a tour cowboy2.  Instead she was astonished as I answered every askance question she had about living on the eastern plains of Colorado raising hay and cattle.  When her eyes couldn’t get much wider, staring at my best attempt to look good for just that evening, she asked, “Do you like  it?”

And for once, something beautiful and true came to mind, “It has to be a lifestyle and cannot just be a livelihood, or you won’t make it.”

She nodded and seemed to finally understand that a young woman in patterned pants and dangling earrings could possibly gear-shift into a role in agriculture.  For nine years, this has been our lives.  Everyday begins with chores, feeding dogs and horses, and cattle in the winter.  Those days then pick up speed as we dress for the work we’re taking on-- coveralls over jeans and long-handles in the winter, and jeans, boots, and lightweight tee shirts are standard in the hot summer.   I’m particularly fond of my Cat-brand baseball cap to hold back this ultra-trendy A-line hair cut I’m sporting.  My hair teases nicely for big-hair at the rodeo or church, but tucks behind my ears well in this hat for daily work.  Before long, equipment is roaring or we are otherwise out in the sun, working.  Trips to town are few, and eating lunch while we’re there depends on which place will take us when we smell of diesel.  

Just once, I’d like to get dressed nicely for town just to eat lunch in a sit-down restaurant, but the back of a gas station has good company when we sit next to over-the-road truckers or farmers that have thirty or sixty years of this life on their faces and hands.  Sandwiches and ice cream are devoured without a thought of calories because we will burn it off faster than we ate it.  

Some afternoons are hot enough we take our evening in the middle of the day.  Equipment overheating and our inability to keep cool means we come in for a few hours until the sun gets a little lower.  Just one day, I’d like to take that time and vacuum the floor or work on my bookkeeping.  Instead exhaustion always wins, and we often doze off in the dim light of our purposely-placed northeastern bedroom, the only cool room in the house.  Someday I’d like to choose a home layout based on flow, not necessity.  Maybe I wouldn’t need an entire room dedicated to muddy boots.  When we awake, we know there is no “evening” in store for us.  We rarely have time to do household chores or watch weekly reality TV shows, and we don’t even have a lawn on which we would run sprinklers.  We load or unload hay.  We follow each other to different fields so that we will have a ride back.  We utilize the shadowy evening to avoid overheating our machinery.  We work well into the night nearly every day including Sundays.

One particular evening, after I’d been to town during the day to buy bolts at the farm store, junk food for a trip, and had my nails done for said trip, we were cutting twine for hay tarping.  I grumbled, “For just one day, I thought I could keep my nails pretty to go on this trip!”  I didn’t even make it two hours before I was effectively ruining them, 12 hours before leaving.  Meanwhile, I started mechanically measuring a yard at a time from chin to fingertip, chin to fingertip, chin to fingertip.  Cut. Start again.  Dig into the tangled ball of splintery twine, get dust and dirt under my nails, let the dryness crack my cuticles, get a blister cutting with dull scissors.  Start again.  The chore is a common one, and I’m used to doing it.  I know the lengths by heart and have systems that work from years of doing it.

Our lives are all encompassing.  Farmers and ranchers can’t pick and choose when they will be farmers and ranchers.  We work when work needs to be done, and we aren’t finished until there is no work left.  To expect to get back from town with five hours until dark and not be asked to help out was foolishness!  To even get a manicure was squeezed in between other errands, making the most of time in town, and finishing first cutting before I left.  There’s no such thing as, “I’ll do that when I get back” and you certainly can’t telecommute.  

The following morning we were ready to visit family in East Chicago, 17 hours away.  As I had my kids packed in the car, and a few days to put on make-up, wear clean clothes, and relax with family, I thought I’d have my “just one day…” feelings all resolved for a whole week!  

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Three hours in, I passed a flat-bed pickup hauling minerals to cattle somewhere, and I already missed home.  

While away from the farm, I spoke with my husband often, and got updates on how the second3 was coming in, what he would be doing with the horse when he was going to leave for a rodeo run, and how the pivot4 was holding pressure with its new nozzles5.  In the midst of relaxing in my grandparent’s gazebo and preparing for fireworks over a lush, park-like lawn, I was my thoughts went back to our young grass field.  I was concerned about getting it cut or sprayed and how the milo was coming in during these hot couple of days that I was gone.  

A genuine interest in our farm never left me while I was away.  Relaxing was well-earned, but somehow it is no longer a part of my lifestyle.  Our livelihood is on the farm, and the lifestyle that comes with it cannot be left behind.  I dressed for the part in Chicago and at the rodeo, but taking even one day away from our lives took away one little piece from me.  Asking for “just one day” to live like a suburbanite or to relinquish farm responsibility is futile because it would be like someone from town asking to jump into my life for just one day.  Though the novelty is always fun for them when they do come to visit, it takes years of work, dedication, selflessness, sacrifices, and a whole lot of sweat to live this life.  It cannot be obtained, or forsaken, for just one day.  With those pretty nails growing out, and ready to be clipped off, I’m thankful that our livelihood afforded them to me, but this lifestyle is why they won’t last for long.

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1. Hospitality tent: n. a covered area for rodeo contestants and their families to eat before or after a rodeo.  Usually catered and provided by a local restaurant.  
2. Tour cowboy: n. a rodeo contestant following a select series of rodeos in order to make enough money to compete in a finals.
3. Second: n. a shortened way of saying “second cutting” which is the new growth after a first harvest, of perennial crops that are cut and baled/harvested multiple times per season.  Many hay farmers have first through fourth cuttings.
4. Pivot: n. one of many regional synonyms for an above-ground sprinkler irrigation system.  Many pivots water tens up to hundreds of acres in a circle, pivoting around from the center.  
5. “holding pressure with its new nozzles”: phrase. Pivots have dozens to hundreds of hoses that water the crops.  At the end of each hose is a tip, nozzle, that allows a certain amount of water through.  If the tips are too big and too much water is used, the pressure will drop and the pivot will shut off.  In this case, the pivot had extra pressure, so new nozzles were added to use as much water as possible while still maintaining appropriate pressure.