07/25/2023
Are You Farm Strong?
âFarm work doesnât make you stronger. It doesnât make you anything. It reveals you.
Thereâs gym strong and then thereâs farm strong. Theyâre mutually exclusive. The toughest women youâll ever meet spend their days on a farm.
There are more uses for twine than you can possibly imagine. You can tie up a hole in a slow feeder, fashion a tail strap for a horseâs blanket, mend a broken fence and use it as a belt.
âWell that certainly didnât go as planned,â is one thing youâll say quite a bit.
Control is a mere illusion. The thought that you have any, at any given time, is utterly false.
Sometimes sleep is a luxury. So are lunch and dinner. And brushing your hair.
If youâve never felt your obliques contract, then youâve never tried stopping an overly full wheelbarrow of horse manure from tipping over sideways. Trust me, youâll find muscles that you never knew existed on the human skeleton to prevent this from happening.
When one of the animals is ill, youâll go to heroic lengths to minimize their discomfort.
Their needs come first. In summer heat and coldest winter days. Clean water, clean bed, and plenty of feed. Before you have your first meal, they all eat.
When you lose one of them, even though you know that day is inevitable, you still feel sadness, angst and emotional pain from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. And itâs a heaviness that lingers even though you must regroup and press on.
Youâll cry a lot. But youâll never live more fully. Youâll remain present no matter what because you must. There is no other option.
Youâll ask for so many miracles and hold out hope until the very last.
You will, at least once, face-plant in the manure pile. Youâll find yourself saying things like, âwe have maybe twenty minutes of daylight left to git âer doneâ whilst gazing up at a nonspecific place in the sky.
Youâll become weirdly obsessive about the weather.
Youâll go out in public wearing filthy clothes and smelling of dirt, sweat and p**p. People will look at you sideways and krinkle their noses but you wonât care.
Your entire day can derail within ten seconds of the rising sun.
You can wash your coveralls. They wonât look any cleaner, but they will smell much nicer.
Farm work is difficult in its simplicity.
Youâll always notice just how beautiful sunrises and sunsets really are.
Should you ever have the opportunity to work on a farm, take the chance! You will never do anything more satisfying in your entire life.â
