A Farmer's Daughter

I grew up on a farm.  My childhood consisted of playing in fields, on haystacks, on top of shed roofs, in ditches, building clubhouses, the list can go on and on.  I reminisce about my childhood a lot. I had so much fun.  Actually helping on this farm though, was something I never really did much of.  I remember the dreaded Saturday mornings that my dad would wake my sisters and I up early to help him move cows to a different coral.  Or the few times a summer we would have to go help him move the irrigation pipes. We didn't do these things very willingly.  When I was really little I always begged my dad to take me with him to go milk the cows at 4 in the morning.  I only managed to wake up for that once, though, and the one time I went I wet my pants because I was too nervous to use the bathroom in the barn that didn't have a lock on the door ( I was a weird kid) I was so embarrassed I never went with him again.  Then there were the times I would go to my dad begging for money, and he would make me help him feed cows for a day for an extra $5 bucks... which came at the end of the month like a normal paycheck would.  As I grew older my daily farm visits turned into weekly, then monthly, then yearly.  Our farm was literally a 2 minute walk from my parents back door, but as my imagination got smaller my interest in going there got smaller. I had no reason to ever go there, and when I did it seemed like some old run down memory that made me kind of sad.  Things just weren't the same as they had been when I was little.  As I got older I got busier and the thought to help my dad never crossed my mind.

Besides getting engaged there, this farm didn't really hold very much importance in my life over the past 8 years. Until recently.

A few months ago my family got the news that no family ever wants to hear, but hear they do, much too often.  My dad had cancer.  Lucky for us and him it was caught extremely early, and it was the #1 curable cancer for men.  Prostate.  There were a few different options for what he could do for treatment, of course none of them seemed more appealing than the other, but he decided to go with surgically removing everything to get rid of it quicker.  This meant he could not do a single bit of manual labor for 6 whole weeks.  He was stressed about the farm, wondering how it was supposed to stay maintained while he was out for the 6 weeks.  My 4 sisters and I reassured him everything would be fine and that we would take over.  3 of us also had husbands to do the extra hard work.  It would all work out.  We are a week into taking over the farm and I have grown a whole new appreciation for what my dad does for our family.  My sister, brother in-law, husband, and I were about half way into our full Saturday's worth of work when we complained about how much there was to do! Then we took a step back and realized there were 4 of us, and only 1 of him, and he managed to do it by himself every single Saturday.  During the first week when my alarm would go off at 5:30 in the morning I would think about how tired I was and the fact that I had to go to school directly after I was done feeding the cows, and then go directly to work after class made me even more tired. But then I remembered my dad does the same thing every single morning but at 3:30 instead, so he can make it to his other job on time, and then he comes home from that job around 5 or 6 and goes back out to feed.  All by himself. I've always thought of my dad as the hardest working man I know, but this experience has taken my knowing that to a whole different level.  My sisters and I have all sworn to each other that even when my dad does get better we will never allow him to take on his work load all by himself again.  We have all humbled ourselves quite a bit and realized we have been kind of selfish.  I have been blessed with such an amazing, hard working dad, who taught me to never give up, even when the work load may appear to be unbearable. And I love him for that.