One summer afternoon (the summer where I ripped the seat out
of every pair of pants I owned), we had finished hauling hay fairly early in
the day, there was a leak in the main line down at the flat that needed
repaired. For any of you who have not
had the privilege of a seek-and-find the leak in the line mission, you have a
generalized mud hole and somewhere beneath all this mud is one (hopefully) hole
that has to be identified and repaired.
This clearly involves a lot of digging, and a lot of mud. Dad and I dug down around a riser to what we
hoped was the problem area, my left leg was down in our hole and my right leg
was up out of the hole. Did I mention
the part about a lot of mud? Yeah, so my
right leg was gradually sinking into the mud as we worked in the hole. We finished up in that spot (I honestly don’t
know if we had found the source of the leak at this point) and as I went to
walk away, I discovered my right leg was firmly planted in that thick mud. As hard as I pulled, the only thing moving
was my femur out of the hip joint. I
started to take my foot out of the boot thinking this would be my only
escape. Dad saw my solution and was like
“No! The mud will cave in around the
boot and you won’t be able to get your foot back in or the boot out of the
ground.” After several more tries it was
apparent that leaving the boot behind was the only option, besides, it already
had a hole in it. We finished our job
and I walked back to the pick-up with one boot and waited for the courier to
bring me a new pair of boots and pants (yup, ripped those ones out too… while
hauling hay earlier in the day) and didn’t think much more about the lost boot.
Fast-forward a few years, I am now married, it is Christmas
Eve and we have just finished singing carols around the tree and Dad tells us
he wants to give us all a gift.
Wait… WHAT?!?!
We begged EVERY SINGLE Christmas Eve for the last 20 years
to open a present on Christmas Eve and the answer was always “No.” Who is this guy?
It was a different kind of gift.
The one you never wear out.
The one you never outgrow.
The one that never goes out of style.
The one you never forget.
He went around the room and told each individual how much he
loved us, and why he was proud of us.
When it was my turn, he mentioned how he appreciated my hard work and
how much he had enjoyed and now missed working with me on the farm. And how every time he walked by my boot
sticking out of the ground as he worked, he got a little tear in his eye.
I had a lot more than a little tear in my eye at this point.
Fast forward a few more years. The farm had decided to abandon one form of
child abuse and upgrade from hand-lines to pivots. As they dug out the risers one by one, they
came to “our riser”, yup, the one with six inches of rubber boot sticking out
of the ground next to it. Dad told the
guys he wanted that riser, they told him there was one already dug out he could
have. “Nope,” he needed “that riser.”
Not sure how much later, a few weeks or a month-or-so later,
I went to Juniper for a visit. As I
walked up the sidewalk, there in the flower bed was a riser, and my boot,
buried, six inches showing above the ground.
I smiled. I'm still my Dad's Princess.
“Did you see it?” Mom
asked as I got to the front door?
Apparently now that I had seen it, she believed that she
would be able to take this “lawn ornament” out.
Nope, this, like the memory of the day it was lost, was to
be a permanent fixture.
I love you Dad! Thank you does not begin to cover my debt to
you. You are my hero in every sense of
the word. Happy Father’s Day to you and all the other Juniper dads that taught me to work, that allowed me to make mistakes and taught me how to fix them.
Mom figured out how to make it work!
Side note about hand lines:
A few weeks ago I was taking care of a kid in the ED who
told us he wanted to be a farmer when he grew up “Best job there is” he
said. The patient, his dad, the doctor
and myself talked a little about farm life and the doc asked how they watered,
“wheel lines or pivots”… wait… what about hand lines? So they said how pivots were the only way to
go and the doctor (who was apparently paid in milk shakes for his farm work as
a child) asked “Do you know what you call hand lines?” Everyone just looked at him waiting for the
answer… “Motivation for higher education!”
Haha. Looking back I always think
of moving hand lines as a good memory, admittedly though, there was often a
great deal of repentance required on my part before I could go to sleep those
nights!
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