Transcript
All the time, we called Jim in the first winter. “The heat’s just stopped” and Jim said “Well, have you put oil in the tank? You have to put heating oil in the tank each year,” and I said, “I don't know what you're talking about.” I'd never been in anything except central air conditioning. I'd had window units. We lived in apartments with the units, but they'd always had central heat at least. Turns out we had ignored the great big tank that was in the backyard that needed to be filled with heating oil at the beginning of the winter. Jim, “The fence is broken. It turns out I have no clue how to string barbed wire.” Jim came over and showed me how to string barbed wire.
I bought a Reader's Digest, this really cool Reader's Digest book on how to fix anything, and it included how to fix all of these old appliances. The joke was that It I could fix anything the second time because ,over and over again, my projects would be: I would try to fix it, it would go horribly wrong and then when I redid it, I could actually do it right.
And that happened with the door. I installed my first door and there was about a 3-inch gap at the bottom of it. When we tried to put puppies in there, for example, they’d crawl out from beneath the door. I rewired a stove, a pretty major undertaking. I had to replace the entire electrical harness and this book showed me how to do it and I did everything. Turn the stove on the first time and literally one of the eyes burst into flames. Flames coming out of an electric eye. I turned it off, pulled out everything I'd done, redid it, and it worked great the second time.
So the house was full of projects, and there was always a project half done in there. You were usually somewhere closer to ten projects half done that I'd get busy with something else, and I would have to come back later and finish them. But I was also always learning how to do these projects, and learning something that many of you may know, that is many times projects begin with one simple thing. Like, oh this little piece of the plumbing has broken, and we were a long ways from a hardware store. So I would go and I’d get that one thing that need to be replaced but it turned out it didn't actually fit right with the thing that was next to it. And when you worked on those, something else broke and you'd end up replacing all of this, and it was usually like five or six trips to the hardware store to get anything fixed.
Then at last we were having a really good time. We had a wonderful time. We were having fun. We learned how to can vegetables and fruits. I learned how to make apple butter. We had blackberries and grapes. We had a beautiful garden, a big sort of truck garden type of fare. We loved walking on the place. I learned how to cut down dead trees and cut them up for firewood. We had a wood-burning stove in the place. It was great fun.
And then there were these periodic calls to Jim. “Jim, the septic system isn't working.” I never owned a septic system in my life. “Oh, well, you've probably killed all the bugs in it. You have to re-establish the bugs.” “How do we do that?” Turns out there's a can of bugs that you buy and you put down and you grow the bacteria back that you need to have working in a septic system. “Jim, the well water seems to be bad. It's making us sick.” And that's because the septic system was higher than the well system. So periodically, and I know it's really horrible to even think about, it would contaminate the well system. He said “Well, you got to pour Clorox down the well, you got to shock the system and that’ll kill all the bad things. Then it will be fine. Okay, so we do that. We learned all of these sorts of things.
We never learned why they were that way, why one designed the well to close to the septic system or things like that, but we did learn to do these things. I learned how to drive a tractor. I had a smaller riding lawnmower and when I say smaller, it was still the biggest riding lawn mower you could have before you get to a tractor. And I used that for the fine cutting of about, I guess there were a couple acres around the house and every once in a while, I'd use it to cut the front field where the horses were when they would get out of line, but I would borrow my neighbor's tractor.
One day I was driving that tractor and I drove over, again I didn't know there was such a thing, I didn't know that yellow jackets had in the ground nests. And I certainly didn't know that they could establish them almost overnight because there had not been a nest there the week earlier when we'd walked through that area, but now there was a yellow jacket nest. So when I drove the tractor over that, they all came swarming up. I jumped off the tractor, ran away couldn't get back near it, and so I had to leave it there until it ran out of gas. Come back after the yellow jackets had gone to bed that night and put some gas in it so I can move it off far enough to actually deal with the tractor.
Each of these things though, like driving a lawnmower, is a kind of amazing experience. It’s a Zen experience. It really was wonderful. I get on this lawnmower. No one could really approach you when you're on a riding lawnmower. You bring order out of chaos, in the yard and there's just something very tranquil about driving a riding lawnmower.
My wife maintains that, when we sold the place seven years later and I had gotten very busy with work and other things and felt like a bad steward, so I wasn't really upset at selling the place. I knew we were selling it to a farmer who was going to take great care of it. She said the only thing that I showed any emotion about was that tractor as it went up on a truck and drove away.
Another thing we learned about being in the country though was our neighbors. We had the most eclectic set of neighbors you could imagine. We had those that never talked to us. We never knew who they were, but right next to them would be one of the couple worked in the schools with special needs children, the other worked as a hospital technician. Another one was a psychiatrist, another one ran a store, a widow lived across the street from us. The neighborhood was mixed racially.
The neighborhood was mixed in age, incomes, and one of the wonderful things about it was when people threw a party everyone was invited. There would just be this huge group of people who would come to every party because a party was relief. Everyone worked two jobs. Typically they were working one job to pay for having the farm and then working on the farm as well. So they’d come together in this party and the parties were always things where all the children came too. Nobody got a babysitter. Nobody left their kids at home. They brought their kids and the kids would run around in the field like this mob of lambs in the spring and the adults would be sitting, you know, having a drink and just watching this gang of children just running all over. And when the children tired themselves out, they put them in the beds in the house and the adults continued to have a party and then everybody typically walked home at the end of the evening. It was a wonderful social event. It was a wonderful social setting, which came as a complete surprise to us.
And there was another aspect of neighbors that was an incredible thing about being on the farm and a new experience. Neighbors looked out for neighbors. The woman across the street, wonderful lady when we would be away at work, we’d come home and she’d tell us. Anyone who stopped at the house during the day, if a truck pulled into our driveway, if anybody stopped, she saw it and she told us about it that that evening. And it was the best neighborhood watch you can imagine.
We had a pretty long driveway. When it snowed, one of our neighbors would always come over with his pickup truck with a blade mounted on the front and clear the snow out of the way. If you were working out in the yard and somebody walked up…this happened over and over again. If you could stop, you'd stop, you know, you might take a break and rest. You might have a beer with them. If you were in the middle of a job that you couldn't stop they’d make a decision that they'd either join you and work for a little while or they'd stand and talk with you and either one was fine. No one expected them to work. Nobody expected anything. No one expected you to stop just because they were there, but you still had this opportunity to commune and it was pretty good.
Some years later, I learned that one of the things storytellers had done in the old days was they would get hired by the owner of a farm and they would go and tell stories to the workers to entertain them. Or the kitchen staff would be there, and a storyteller would come and tell them stories while they work to make the time pass better. It was a sort of reward from the owner.
In a lot of ways, neighbors were like that in the country. It was it was a great lesson. One of the, I think, the life lessons that came out of that was yet again, and this is a lesson I think I've really learned over and over again, which is things are rarely like I think they'll be. I didn't anticipate either the things that would be a challenge about living in the country or the things that would be a wonderful benefit. And I've since found that that's true wherever I go in the world, any country, wherever I go in the United States, I'll have something in my head that this is how this is going to be and it is almost never like that. Over time, I've learned to try to let go of my preconceived notions of how places are going to be that I haven't seen before and just enjoy them for what they are.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Bits & Peaces.
We’ll continue with the farm stories for several more stories. The next story is about the pony that I mentioned earlier, so please come join me for that story.
Thank you for joining me here at Dan's Tiki Bar.
I'm Dan Slone. I look forward to seeing you next time.
Bye!
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