A few weeks ago I made the long drive from northeast Arkansas to my family's farm in northwest Kansas. It is always a treat to go home to see mom and dad, play fetch with Mitzi, my parent's cute Australian Shepherd, go for a gallop on my trusty steed Denny, or take an evening walk to watch the beautiful sunset over the Kansas horizon. However, on this particular trip I wanted to get in on one of the most exciting (and exhausting) times of the year for Kansas farmers...wheat harvest! It's one time of the year that farmers both love and hate. However, I think nearly every farm kid I have ever met holds a special appreciation in their heart for wheat harvest and most look forward to its coming each year. In many ways it is a major adrenaline rush, a race against time, a battle against the weather. It's long hours and hard days. It takes everyone on the team pulling together to get the job done. Finally, once it is done, you can all breathe a little easier again, and there is a shared sense of accomplishment. From the time I was old enough to obey instructions and sit still for any small length of time, I was riding on a tractor, a combine, in a pick-up, or on a horse. Mom and Dad took my big brothers and I everywhere with them and so many of our adventures took place while helping on the farm. I remember hiding under the tractor hydraulic console or having dirt clod wars while riding with Mom or Dad, discing the field. While fixing fence, we would prop a shovel up in the spare tire in the back of the pick-up, stick an empty feed sack on the top for a sail, and pretend the pick-up was a boat and we were sailing across the pasture. Many other times while Dad and Mom were working, we would be close by, building huts out of sunflower stalks, hay or grass, and bits of twine, pretending we were native americans or pioneers roughing it on the prairie. We shared many more adventures, but I'll save blogging about them for some other time. Let's just say I wouldn't have traded my rather isolated, family-oriented life on the farm for any other kind of place to grow up in. It was a great way to foster creativity, promote ingenuity, and teach teamwork.
Often my fondest memories on the farm took place during wheat harvest. As a little tyke, I remember sitting on the hard wooden passenger seat in the old combine clutching a stuffed animal, or curling up on the floor asleep while Mom or Dad ran the combine late into the night, sometimes until 2 a.m.! It was always fun to ride as a passenger on the wheat trucks to take the grain to the elevator in town. Mom taught us fun songs about wheat harvest (to the tune of Christmas carols), and when you got to town, there was always the chance that the people at the elevator would be handing out a free soda. Back at the field, we would build little huts or forts in the tall fireweed plants that lined the edges of the fields, usually to have some shade from the hot summer sun while waiting for the green, roaring beast of a combine to come back around the field. And of course, we had lots of fun "swimming" in the back of the wheat truck. When it is about half full of grain, it's like a gigantic bed of wheat. We would climb up the front of the truck and crawl into the back, where we would sink down into the wheat and pretend it was a swimming pool. Sometimes you could even use the bars that support the tarp over the bed to do summersaults around and land in the soft wheat. Of course, it wasn't all play. Once we were old enough to help, we did. As soon as I was old enough to slap two pieces of bread, meat, and cheese together, I got to help make lunches for the "harvest crew", which we would pack into old plastic ice cream buckets and take to the field. Mom and I would work hard to make fun and easy to prepare foods ahead of time, and we almost always stocked up on lots of my favorite fresh fruits during harvest. When I put together the lunches by myself things got a little interesting. My family still LOVES to tell everyone stories about some of my more...um...creative lunch specialties; mostly sandwiches that included unusual ingredients such as wheat kernels and pickled beets.
Once old enough to drive the tractor and combine, when needed I could operate the grain cart (which sometimes gets tricky), drive the automatic semi-truck, and run the combine, which was my favorite! Last summer I spent the greater part of a day for over a week driving the combine or grain cart while Mom and Dad drove trucks to town. It takes some alertness to monitor everything going on and make sure the wheat is feeding into the machine right and that the header isn't scooping up dirt. Sometimes the job gets looong, but I've always liked it. Even as a little girl I always thought the view from the combine - looking out of the big window onto the golden wheat field and across the horizon as the amber wheat pours into the big bin in the back - was one of the most fascinating and breath-taking sights in the whole world.
