I loved it. Snow spraying my face and instantly melting against my red skin as I held on for dear life. Giggles filled the air, mixed while the cows’ cried with gratitude when they saw the ‘91 Dodge moseying down the road with a bale on the back to feed them and their babies. But, I always hated when we went below the shop, to the deadliest field of all. For some reason, it always had mass quantities of cow pies compared to the rest of the rance, and let me tell you: I always hated the frozen cow pies. The tiny little speed bumps, meager to the truck left bruises on my arms, legs, and tummy. They caused me to crash and tumble. It wasn’t an odd site to see a boot flying to the left; purple mitten stripped from my frozen fingers. The boot was recovered -- the mitten was not. I hated that field.
But soon enough, spring melted those large piles of manure, and it would get stuck on my muck boots with straw and hay making it hard to walk. The cows just after having their babies were waspy and intolerant to a little girl’s desire to play with the wobbly legged babies. ‘So rude,’ I would think, as I sprinted to the 4-wheeler to dodge the protective mama from booting me in the britches. I hated that …show more content…
Summer doesn’t only bring out the heavy machinery, allergies, but there is a sense of truth. There’s a feeling I hold tight in my soul, and it’s the feeling sitting on the steps of the swather after an entire field is cut. The way the neat rows look from the plush grass that I dreadfully helped irrigate. The heat from the sun beating down on me. Hands sore from scrapped knuckles from fixing the fence last week. The feeling of relief that an entire year’s work is coming to an end, just to start over, whether it’s feeding all winter, morning and night -- Christmas, and New Year's or the sense of progression seeing a rockless field, with exhausted hamstrings or not. It’s seeing all the new babies taking their first steps, and the sound of a calf’s first breath after successfully pulling him, and the sight of bails stacked neatly in the hay yard. Even the second crop of the summer isn’t thick, not as lush, but it’s enough. From first glance, it’s easy to resent something so trivial as a field below the shop. I could say I hate that field, but I don’t. I love everything that it has to give: a safe haven for the deer, a world for the birds, the snakes, the mice. A shelter from the wind and snow for the cows’ and their babies. It provides food to many: whether it’s a home, or a nest. When there's a drought, it doesn’t beg, or cry