I’m 47 and sometimes still don’t feel like a grown-up quite honestly. Thank goodness people can’t read my mind. But then I check myself and remind myself of my chronological age, and I smarten up.
I think it was probably the generation I grew up in, ‘the times’ we were in, and also because I grew up on a farm, that I gained responsibilities so early on.
I know I was 9 when I learned to drive my Dad’s 1974 GMC Sierra, we called him Norman, I loved that truck. If a truck could be a father figure, he was Norman.
I started driving the John Deere when I was 11. Started baby-sitting when I was 11. That kind of terrifies me, looking back, but I was responsible, I really was. I’m not saying my younger daughter is irresponsible per se, but she’s 17 and I’m not sure she could properly care for a baby for an entire day. I say that sort of tongue in cheek, but if you knew her…
As I’ve said before, my Dad taught us early and trusted my sisters and I with adult chores because he really had no choice. His farm was his alone. It wasn’t a family thing as in his parents or siblings were in on it with him. He was a one man show and he had no sons, just 3 daughters. We were his right hand men.
I loved it. I was reading my old calendiaries just a couple evenings ago, from ’90-’92 and in the September months of those years, really all I talked about was farming. It makes me laugh now, how in grade 9, I made daily updates about how harvesting was going. I guess I was really that immersed in it.
“Didn’t go to school again today, hauled grain.”
“Hauled bales all day today.”
“Cut the hay in the afternoon.”
I missed so much school the first couple of weeks of grade 9, to help with harvest, that the school called looking for me, wondering where I was. And in those days you could go on the lamb for quite some time before the school noticed or cared. It’s not like today where the school calls before the end of the day to let you know your child is absent.
Testing grain was another responsibilty I had as a teenager. I was very proud my Dad trusted this to me. When you begin combining, you need to ensure the grain is not too wet and using the tester tells you the moisture content of it. You don’t want to haul it to town and try to sell it if the moisture content isn’t perfect because you’ll get less money for it, or the grain buyer at the elevator might not even take it.
The tester was this contraption that, according to my Dad, was worth more than our entire farm. I had to handle it with kid gloves and make sure I performed each of the gazillion steps to using it, with absolute precision.
So he would begin combining and I would ride up on the top of the combine right at the hopper, and as the grain came out I would catch a sample in a ketchup can. I’d take instruction from him in the tractor and he’d nod his head when he wanted me to catch a sample. This was done throughout various places in the field.
Once he was satisfied, he would stop the tractor and I would climb down off the combine and run home with my ketchup can of grain that I had to treat like the holy grail, and test it.
No cell phones back in these days so once I tested it, I drove back out to the field where he awaited the magic number. If he was satisfied, he kept combining, and if not, he stopped for another day of ‘drying’.
And that was just my life.
bloom.planted.north 
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