As the Rural World Turns

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I had a sense that I was walking straight into a mess. At this point, I was a young Soil Conservationist for my local Soil and Water Conservation District, and I had met Jeff a time or two at various farming meetings in the county, but this was the first time he had ever called me. I would later come to recognize a familiar pattern of rapid intensification within his calls.  

“Stephen, how are you?”

“Good, good.” 

“This is Jeff Wilson.”

“Hey, Jeff, how ya doing?

“Well, I’ve been better, if I’m being honest–I’m about to lose a fifty acre field I’ve been renting on account of some shenanigans.” He said this like a singer warming up, his voice getting a little louder and higher with every single word uttered. 

“What’s the problem?” I asked. 

“Well, you know as well as I do, that this is has been one of the wettest falls we’ve ever had, and we were a little late getting the wheat planted on account of that, and then it turned bitter cold and some of the corn stalks have washed and piled up in the bottom of a terrace, and landowner acts as if his whole field is washing away.”

“I hate to hear that,” I said. 

“You’re dang right, I hate it too. I tried to explain to him that the soil hadn’t washed–heck, it’s too cold for it to wash with the ground frozen, but he said I wasn’t taking proper care of his land, and that he’s already got another offer from a farmer who wants to rent it next year. And then I knew exactly what was going on.”

“Shenanigans,” I said. 

“Worse than shenanigans. You’d best believe that I know exactly which farmer it is–I won’t say his name–but he does this all the time, always trying to rent tracts out from underneath people, and stirring up stuff with landowners. You’d better believe I’m gunna deal with him, but could you come out to explain to the landowner, as a neutral party, that there’s nothing more I could have done in a year like this, that there hasn’t been any real washin, not even the slightest rut started.” 

“Well, I guess I can,” I said. I don’t know why I said yes. I’d like to think at that point in my career I still felt obligated to help people if I could, even if the ask was a little outside of my job description.

Despite Jeff’s reputation for being slightly excitable, everybody knew he worked hard, and I doubt I have ever met a farmer with a bigger chip on his shoulder. His father was actually a banker, but despite the apparent advantage of startup capital, Jeff’s farming pursuits seemed just about as profitable as everybody else’s, meaning hardly profitable at all. If I had to psychoanalyze him, I suspect the stubborn determination so common in young farmers trying to prove they can defy the odds (or their father’s advice) and make a living farming was amplified a thousandfold in Jeff. It wasn’t from lack of trying that Jeff failed. But in choosing farming, he had traded compound interest for compound problems. 

So I felt obligated to help, and the spot in question was much as Jeff described over the phone. There was about a 3 foot by 10 foot bare strip of red soil showing, where the residue had washed down in the bottom of the terrace. No rut, just a bare spot upstream above a little dam of corn stalks. Mr. Rutherford, the landowner,  seemed relieved when I told him this wasn’t anything to worry about, that all it needed was a little straw thrown on it, that it had been an awfully wet year. Jeff had seemed rather solemn as we walked through the field, but now he nodded vigorously.

“Well, I was worried my field was eroding,” said the landowner, “When that other farmer stopped by and said I ought to be concerned, I guess I jumped the gun a little bit.”

“Mr. Rutherford,” said Jeff, “I want you to know I pride myself on taking care of landowners’ fields, just as if they were my very own, and I hate to say this about another farmer but he ain’t nothing but a snake, just trying to pick up some rented land, and you better believe he’s got a thing or two coming. He ought to know better than to mess with me. Two can play at that.”

Face red, Jeff was now fully animated as he talked. He was shaking his head with emphasis, spitting a little inadvertently, and looking at us directly in the eye beneath his slightly cockeyed ball cap. Mr. Rutherford and I smiled nervously, and I suggested that it was too cold to stand around in a field. 

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Rutherford. Your field is in good hands,” said Jeff, excitedly.    

Later, in the spring, I was sitting in the office, when one of my coworkers brought in news of the latest rumor sweeping the countryside. At night, someone had cut all the strings on a certain farmer’s freshly cut hay bales, in a field not too far from Mr. Rutherford’s. I just grinned–and didn’t say a word.

hay bales on the field

The Secret to a Happy Marriage

~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

I’m no Casanova, but I know a thing or two: I know diamonds are dumb and roses are for rubes and the real way to a woman’s heart is to fix the washing machine. Lately, my wife has been dropping lots of amorous hints, like “The washing machine got stuck again,” and “Ugh! I had to restart that load of towels three times!”

I like to play it coy at first, as if I’m not even listening, which really drives her wild. 

“Did you hear me?” she asked.

“I will take a look at it,” I replied nonchalantly. I call this advanced romantic repartee, “The Art of the I Will.” It is best used repeatedly, to build playful tension in the relationship, ideally to the point where your wife is teasing you about outsourcing appliance repair to another man. 

“If you don’t look at it soon, I’m going to call a repairman,” she deadpanned.  

“I will, I will,” I said. 

It’s playing with fire, but these days appliance repairmen are a dying breed, so it’s highly unlikely there is one locally who could service the washer, but never–and I repeat never–do you want a polite, punctual, professional elderly man testing your wife’s sensors or swapping out her actuator. That is a standard you’ll never be able to live up to. 

This past weekend, after a long buildup of “I wills,” I took it upon myself to plan a big romantic getaway. Really, my wife was the only one getting away, to go visit her parents. Her dad has been having some health issues, and since Thomas was sick, I stayed home with him for a guy’s weekend. 

My plan was to surprise her by cleaning the house and fixing the washing machine while she was gone. I had secretly ordered the needed part for the washer earlier in the week. According to the polite, punctual, professional elderly man on YouTube, repairing the faulty door lock mechanism should only take twenty minutes. 

After two hours, I gave up.

 “Ugh! This stupid washer!” I said. 

“You’re not supposed to say ‘stupid,”” Thomas replied. He had been acting as my assistant, mostly picking up the tiny screws I kept fumbling and dropping. I had hoped to impress him with my handyman acumen. But this was beyond my skill to diagnose and fix. It was not the door lock mechanism. It was not a clogged inlet screen. The washer just refused to switch over to the spin cycle, even after it had drained. 

“Don’t tell my mom I said that,” I told Thomas. “How about we go down to the barn and get the hand truck.” 

“Why?”

“Cause we’re going to get rid of this piece of junk and buy a new washer.”

Guys, let me tell you–there are few gestures more romantic than fixing a washing machine. One is buying a new washer and having it ready upon your wife’s return home. 

Another, cheaper option, is doing the laundry. 

Heed and remember. 

The Old Washer

One Man Stands Alone

~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

Traffic circles, or roundabouts as we call them around here, seem to be popping up everywhere in rural North Carolina. It’s like the NC DOT ran out of stoplights and stop signs, so they’ve just decided to build some circles for drivers to navigate at their own leisure. Last week, I may have set the record for most consecutive circumnavigations of a single circle. Ambush would be too strong a word, but I was definitely surprised to find a brand new traffic circle out in the the middle of nowhere, and once it in, I had to go around three or four times to make heads or tales out of the signage, which became more difficult with each subsequent pass because I started to become a little dizzy. 

Thankfully, no one else was around or going around while I was circling, so I was just a lone man driving in circles, trying to find my way in this brave new world of self-serve traffic patterns, self-serve everything. 

When Thomas fractured his arm last year, I got stuck in self-serve purgatory. I needed to get a copy of all his bills for my insurance, but his doctor’s office here no longer deals with billing, and so they gave me the number for the regional billing office. I called them and they told me I could access all his records in the client self-serve portal. Only, I couldn’t. I had already tried on my computer and on my phone and on my wife’s computer, but my entry into the portal was barred for reasons beyond anybody’s understanding–the IT department couldn’t figure it out, the billing department couldn’t figure it out. They kept ping-ponging me back and forth.  

So I went back to Thomas’s doctor’s office, prepared to begin a hunger strike if they didn’t give me a copy of his records. Do you know who figured it out? The pleasant receptionist at the front desk. Somebody in billing had entered my birthday wrong. That’s why I couldn’t get into the portal. Still, she didn’t have the power to fix it. Eventually, her boss came over and, upon hearing my tale of woe, took pity on me and broke protocol. I had literally spent hours on the phone attempting to resolve this problem, mostly on hold trying not to spontaneously combust. She printed out my bills in less than a minute. 

As a nation, we need to repent of this stupidity. Yesterday, I was in Lowe’s and was sad to see that the hostile takeover by self-serve registers was nearly complete. I am glad my wife’s Poppaw didn’t live long enough to see this current state of affairs. He used to be on a first name basis with all the cashiers at Lowes. Now, not a single old school register, manned by a cashier, remained in the main checkout area. I suppose the Lowes CEO thought their reputation for customer service couldn’t get any worse and just decided to get rid of customer service altogether. He should be wearing sackcloth. 

At the risk of sounding like I’m turning into an old curmudgeon, I’ll admit I may feel a little lost in our brave new self-serve society. At the rate society is progressing, soon the only person I’ll have left to blame is myself, and where’s the fun in that? 

Beware the Company of a Cat

~ sanebishop ~ 2 Comments

If you ever see a black and white cat on the run, do not approach or engage the animal. It could be Barney, our barn cat, and he should be presumed dangerous. He goes by many aliases: Barn, Barn-Man, Barn-Barn, Barn Master, Little Barney Boy, and Sweet Little Barn Muffin. 

Barney first came to us at about the same time our previous barn cat, Bunty, was dying. Bunty was thirteen years old, and Barney just showed up out of nowhere, a spry and spirited juvenile. My wife believes Barney was a godsend, which is exactly what a blossoming con artist cat would want you to think. My best guess is that Barney asked around to find the barn with the oldest cat and decided to take up there in an attempt to become heir apparent. 

It worked. 

Now Barney has even swindled his way from the barn to our porch, and I would consider him more of a porch cat than a barn cat–though I wouldn’t consider him entirely ours. I’m pretty sure Barney scams other families during the day. I believe this because my wife bought a fancy tracker collar to put on him so she can monitor his movements and protect him from peril. Every day he makes a circuit to three other houses in our vicinity. Then, at night, he comes and sleeps on our back porch in a little cat house with a heated pad–Bunty is probably rolling over in his grave (he used to sleep on a pillow in the hayloft). 

“Little Barn-Barn, do you have secret families you visit during the day?” asked my wife, interrogating him after seeing the tracker data. Barney remained silent. He does not like the tracker, and sometimes I wonder if he likes me. 

“It’s under there,” my wife said, pointing to the location where Barney first lost his tracker. 

The tracker is on a breakaway collar, and Barney enjoys finding new places to break free. There, in this instance, was the old corn crib, which, sitting on fieldstones piers, had about a foot and a half of ground clearance. He lost it right underneath the middle of the structure, meaning I had to dust off my claustrophobia to crawl under there and retrieve the collar.  A few days later, he broke loose again. 

“It’s in there,” my wife said this time. 

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. There was now a tremendous blackberry thicket that I had to tunnel through on all fours. Eventually, the tracker collar became too much of a nuisance for all involved and Barney now roams unmonitored, but I still have the sneaking suspicion that he has something else up his sleeve. 

During the past few weeks, due to the winter storms, my wife has broken her own protocol–no animals inside–and taken the extraordinary step of letting Barney sleep inside our house on those bitter cold nights. She put an old pillow in a cardboard box, and the first night he slept soundly in this makeshift bed. On the second night, however, I awoke in the middle of night to a cat kicking me in the head. Apparently, Barney had gotten out of his bed, jumped into our bed, and snuggled down between man and wife. When I awoke, he was asleep on his back, pummelling me with his hind legs, as if he was trying to push me off the bed.

All this is to say, I think Barney wants me out of the picture.

Man Plans. Weatherman Laughs

~ sanebishop ~ 11 Comments

On the Tuesday before the storm, I called my wife to begin the necessary bureaucratic process. We make each other jump through hoops to justify big purchases, if for no other reason than one of us–usually her–can say “I told you so” once the purchase proves imprudent. 

“I think we need to buy a generator,” I said, sneaking the comment nonchalantly into a conversation that started as inquiry into our dinner plans for the night. 

“A generator!?–where did that come from?” she asked. 

“They’re calling for a big snowstorm this weekend.”

“Weren’t they calling for snow last week too–and we didn’t get anything?” 

“Yeah, but this one is different. They’re saying it’s going to be bad–even catastrophic.” 

“Generators are dangerous–my dad burnt up a refrigerator with a generator when I was a kid.” 

“Well, how else are we going to stay warm if the power goes out?” Although our old farmhouse has three fireplaces, the unstable fieldstone chimneys have been cut down. The fireplaces are now defunct, and we have no alternate heat source if our heat pump is without power. “Remember how bad it was when we lost power during Helene–and that was when it was warm,” I continued. 

“Let me think about it,” she said. At that point, I knew she would acquiesce, but the problem with our bureaucratic process is that it takes time.  By the next morning, when she verbally rubber stamped my acquisition request, saying “I guess you can get a generator,” there were no generators left to acquire. I had done my research overnight and had hoped to buy a small gas generator in the $500 to $600 dollar range but Lowes was completely wiped out, not a single generator remained in the store. 

I was left to hurry home and scour Amazon in search of any generator that could be delivered before the storm hit on Saturday. The cheapest one I could find was $1000, but supposedly it could be delivered by Friday afternoon. I don’t think I’ve been so nervous about a delivery since the birth of my son. 

“Why are you so wound up?” my wife asked. 

“I’m worried the generator won’t get here in time.”

“We’ll survive if it doesn’t.”

Sure enough, on Friday, I got a notification from UPS that my delivery was delayed. Had the original forecast proved accurate, we would have been doomed to shiver, but the storm had slowed and the generator was delivered Saturday afternoon, right before the first sleet pellets began to fall. 

Sleet was actually good news. Meteorologists had been waffling back and forth on sleet versus freezing rain, warning that freezing rain would be the worst case scenario in terms of power outages. But the freezing rain held off until the tail end of the storm on Sunday evening–and, of course, the power never went out. 

“I told ya we didn’t need a generator,” my wife said, though she did sprinkle her “I told you so” with some pity, “but at least we have one now if we ever need it.” 

Despite being secretly disappointed the power didn’t go out so I could justify my big purchase and prevent the marital “I told you so,” I am glad it wasn’t all freezing rain. Thomas got to go sledding for the first time!

Down the hill, he goes!