Valentine's Day: Love on the Farm

Guest Post By The Real Farmwives and Friend's Lana of Walking the Off-Beaten Path

Valentine’s Day… Love on the farm... Kind of makes one think of spring and all the animals getting “reacquainted” with each other.  It’s nice to think of warm thoughts, especially tonight.

We are getting ready to face one of the coldest nights of our new year, and it brings to mind a romantic memory created many years ago in the same icy, bone-chilling weather.

Tall Guy and I were in our courting years, with emphasis on YEARS!  We dated about six years to the day before saying “I do” in the same church where my parents exchanged vows 40 years earlier.  Don’t even get me started on the whys and wherefores…..let’s just say I was hooked from the get-go, and he finally saw the light.

We lived about 25-20 miles apart, and this memory is about one of the coldest days on record, although I cannot remember the year... 1997?   It was frigid, and all I could think of was my guy going out to unthaw waterers then milk and feed the dairy cows.  It was sooo cold, and I was (still am!) rather impulsive.

That morning I grabbed my Longaberger picnic basket and filled it with all the fixin’s for waffles and bacon and headed up to the farm.  I remember my car grumbling at me when I started it, and I also remember the lack of traffic on the roads.  It was like -20! But true love knows no bounds, not even the frozen kind, and off I was to make my guy a warm breakfast.

That’s how an English teacher thinks, with her heart, with one too many romance novels floating through her mind.  Tall muscular man with frost clinging to his beard walks in to a warm house with the smell of homemade waffles and bacon...strides over to the woman who has created all these heavenly aromas, and sweeps her off her feet in a warm embrace…

Uhmmmm NOT!  I fell in love with a practical man who was dumbfounded that I would even consider going out in such dangerous weather.  Did I know how cold it was???   What if the car had stalled???  What if he hadn’t been here??? ( Ok, Seriously?  Where else would he be?)  He really thought I was nuts, and he was probably right.  He still thinks I’m nuts sometimes, but I’ve grown on him, and sometimes I even make him smile at my silly, impulsive notions! 

When you are in love with a farmer, you have to find romance where you can.  Watching the sun set while sharing a seat in the tractor cab, helping to pull a calf from its mother, chatting as a seemingly endless number of cow hindparts go by on their way to the milking stalls, feeding the calves and the 150 cats that follow you hoping for spilled milk, sharing a supper in a grain truck.  Juggling kids while helping him move harvest equipment from field to field.  We don’t have the dairy anymore, but we do have feeder cows, ones we get ready for market, and they still require a lot of attention some days.

You have to love this life, love this farmer, and then it all makes beautiful sense... Until the next time you have to drive a new piece of equipment for the first time under the instruction of your beloved!  ;-)

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone.  Enjoy your steak dinner!