Work: Down on the Farm

“We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work” – Thomas Edison

My earliest memories associated with work are captured in three distinct images. The first is sliced apples. The second is stalks being chewed up in the combine. The third is bumblebees.

The Apple Slices

It doesn’t get any more American than this. Eating a packed lunch while sitting on a rock with your back resting against a huge, white barn door. The treat of the lunch was apple slices, which at that point of my life, fascinated me. We had an apple slicer, a metal one where you pushed down, and it cored and sliced the apple in one quick motion.

My brain tells me this is my first day of work. I might be five. I might be four. Heck, I might be younger. The little that I recall other than the apples slices is that it might be cloudy out, and it might be planting season.

The only possible reason this memory remains filed away with any importance has to be the lunch and the apple slices. I mean, you’re really a working man when you have a packed lunch and you eat it outside. Toss in your favorite snack, and that must have been the “bee’s knees.”

Before I get too far, I should explain. My father farms what is now a centennial farm – a farm owned by the same family for a century. Until I was five or six, he did this exclusively, but sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s, he was forced to take another job in town. My mother stayed at home to rear the three kids, take care of the house, and perform all the other work that probably went underappreciated.

The narrative in my mind says this is before my father took his day job – working at an animal feed mill – and for some reason, he was watching me while farming because my mother had something to do with my two older siblings.

I’d like to say there’s a big life lesson in this first image, but the closest thing I can garner is that it’s the first food association I make with anything. It’s sort of like how I think of noisy grade school lunchrooms when I eat a PBJ. It’s wonderful in the gold-shaded lenses of the memory, but at the end of the day, they were just apple slices or a sandwich.

The Corn Stalks

My mind plays funny tricks here because it tells me that those slices were ate on a day that seemed pretty spring like. There’s a dampness there, and that’s all I can recall. Yet, it also wants to tell me that later on I rode in the cab of the combine as my father picked corn.

As years later Tom would tell me after the election of Donald Trump that we live in the “Post-Truth” era, I think memory often forgets the truth. I certainly picked corn with my father at some point, probably not as often as I should have, and it’s possible it was the same day as the apple slices or the same day as I ate some apple slices, but not the ones in my memory.

I like to dramatize both scenes in my head. The eating of apples slices on a day with maybe threatening weather. The destruction of the stalks before me, as if my young mind was drawing some sort of deep meaning of life from the harvesting of a crop. I don’t know. I think there was always a part of me that feared farming. Maybe it was a voice – likely my mother’s – urging me not to get interested, but it’s not right to place that decision on my mother. I never wanted that work growing up, and maybe both of my memories are tinted with a bit of regret. In my mind, regret is tinted orange.

Mostly, I think farming scared me because of the bees.

The bumblebees

A few years ago, I was driving home after deadline during a time when I was serving as the assistant sports editor at Sauk Valley Media. From the start of the shift sometime in the afternoon to finishing the paper late in the evening, the world disappeared behind a wall of white snow. Never in my life have I been out in a storm like that, and hopefully I’ll never be driving in one like that again.

The headlamps on our Ford Ranger were devoured after only a few feet in the falling and blowing snow, and I made it about a half mile before slamming into an insurmountable drift. I wouldn’t discover until the next morning that I was driving almost four lanes farther to the left than I meant to be. This story probably comes up again later, as one of the times I risked my life for the sake of finishing a shift or completing a task.

After spending a few minutes trying to dig out, I returned to the warmth of the truck realizing I couldn’t risk walking back to the office because I’d either get lost in the blinding snow or get hit by a car. In those shivering moments, it came to me that if I weren’t very smart over the course of the next few minutes or hour, I just might not make it out alive.

When retelling the story, I’d like to throw out that it was the first time in my life I’d felt that sort of imminent danger. Until I started to think about the bumblebees, I thought I was telling the truth.

But the bumblebees were a danger and, even at a very young age, I sensed just how very real that danger was to that burning spark of life coursing through my limbs.

We’re back behind the barn for this one, and work is swirling around me as my father and my siblings unload a rack filed with bales of hay onto an elevator one bale at a time. The elevator carries the bales up toward a door and the loft behind.

I am wearing blue shorts. I am pretty sure about that, and the grass on the hill leading up to the barn is tall, maybe tall enough to reach over my head. Dreams of adventure dance through my head as I play and work commences in the world around me.

Then there is the buzzing, and it’s like the rest of the world stops. I freeze, nothing moves, except for the bees, which swarm around in angry circles. Below my feet is a hive. The buzzing drowns out everything else, and I focus on the tiny wings that flutter at god-awful speeds. The attacks come from all angles on my arms and my legs. I must cry out, because somehow others are alerted. I don’t hear my cries. I just hear the buzzing. I am scooped up by my father before the stings become too numerous and the buzzing fades.

I am certain death will be quiet except for one sound. I fear that sound will be buzzing for me.

As I look back, I realize that my time spent growing up on the farm was an opportunity, and not one I took great advantage of. It all seemed hot and dirty, and somewhere fluttering in the extremities of my senses lingered fear.