Dave and I celebrated an anniversary this past month on April 4. Of the two of us, Dave is the anniversary rememberer. It’s not so much that I forget the date as that I never realize that we’ve moved past March and into April. I’m a spring denier.
It doesn’t matter that calving has been well underway for over a month and that the fieldwork is popping. I still have my list of winter to-do’s that I haven’t half touched, and I need spring to just hold its horses. “Back off,” I yell out the back door on particularly beautiful days. “Don’t get in such a big rush. How about one more week of snow?”
For this reason, I’m never any good at weather small-talk at the grocery store check-out line. I know it’s acceptable human practice to complain about the weather, but I’m always complaining in the wrong direction. When the nice cashier says, “I am so tired of this rain,” I have to bite my tongue or I’ll snap, “You mean the rain I’ve been praying for all year long?” or when she says, “I’m just sick of the cold. Bring on summer!” I want to say, “Oh my word, don’t go encouraging summer! I’m still trying to keep the door shut on spring!” Thank goodness for wind. In Idaho, we can all agree on wind and have a right good time hating on it while we load the groceries into my cart. But I’d take even the wind if it’d hold back the weeds for an extra half month. Once I have both outside and inside chores to do, I know I’m never going to get the basement cleaned out.
I honestly don’t know why we got married in the spring. It’s as if we hadn’t lived in Idaho our whole lives. What were we thinking? If I had thrown a dart at the calendar blindfolded, I couldn’t have picked a worse date than the one I chose with my eyes wide open. There are dates just as bad, of course; anything to do with hay and harvest come to mind, but none worse. The weather forecast for spring in Idaho can be summed up in one sentence, “We’ll be having #$%&* wind almost every single stinkin' day, and work to do in it absolutely every $%&*# day.” Our anniversary is kind of like Easter in Idaho; if we actually have decent weather, we are almost worried that it’s a sign of the end of times.
Whatever date we could have chosen, I have to honestly ask myself, would this Coleman couple really have celebrated our anniversary differently anyway? Would we have gone anywhere? Would we have left the farm?
When Dave and I did the math, we realized we have been married 29 years. I said to him, “That means that next year is our 30th, and we’ll have to plan something special.” Dave just looked at me. I guess being married longer than dirt means that we can’t get away with lying to each other or even to ourselves. So I corrected myself, “I mean something special just like we did for our 25th, 20th and 10th anniversaries.” Which is to say, absolutely nothing. OK, that’s not entirely true. I mean absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. We always go out for a steak dinner because – although we have 500 pounds of beef in the freezer – nothing says “I love you” like not having to cook it ourselves or, even better, not having to do our own dishes. So, our anniversary basically means we go out to eat someone else’s beef and pay them top dollar for the privilege. We are making progress on the scale of self-indulgence though. When the kids were little, I remember putting them to bed and eating cold takeout at 10 o’clock, and thinking we were getting away with something. That was probably our 10th anniversary.
The awful truth is: We don’t really want to go anywhere. We are so old and so set in our ways, so boring, so calcified, so embedded in this farm, that what we really want is for everyone else to go away, so we can get our work done. On occasion, that might even mean each other.
I remember several years back receiving a call from a good friend. She and her husband also farm, and she called me to get a little advice about how to get her kids to Yellowstone before she died. She knew I had actually done it once, and she didn’t want her kids to grow up in Idaho without ever seeing the park.
Getting a farm family to Yellowstone is actually a difficult and strategic problem; Emily fully recognized this and called me almost a year in advance. To begin with, you need to be able to pry the farmer off the farm, which means you can’t go anywhere until October, when harvest is over. By then, of course, October can mean snow in the upper country. You will not have enough snow to play in, but enough to make sightseeing nippy. I told her the first week in October was her best bet, especially when the schools take a long weekend. Our pictures from our vacation there show the kids wearing both winter coats and shorts, another sure sign we are in Idaho. And of course, in the background, the snow is starting to fall.
I am going to rethink our 30th anniversary, I really am. Maybe we should do something more exciting than field work and more entertaining than trying to find seed potatoes for the garden. Though we may look it, we aren’t exactly dead yet. Maybe I’ll surprise Dave with round-trip tickets to Someplace-without-Wind, USA. Then I can send him off with the kids for a week, and I’ll have time to get a good head start on the basement.
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