Donna had done her best to pass her position on the farm to her daughter-in-law gracefully. First, she’d passed on her role as bookkeeper to Elaine, going so far as to move the filing cabinet from the spot in Donna and Dale’s house where it had permanently crushed the carpet to Elaine and Jeff’s new house across the yard.
Then Donna had passed on her role as coffee coordinator, making sure that her husband Dale and son Jeff took breaks in Elaine’s house, rather than sitting in their usual chairs around Donna’s dining room table.
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Donna resisted the urge to pass on her muffin tins and recipes. “Only the worst of meddling mother-in-laws would complain about store-bought cookies now and then.”
At first, Donna made the most of her new-found free time. She took up with a whole group of newly retired women. For the first time since her kids were born, Donna could actually go along when she was invited to coffee get-togethers. These progressed to shopping days in the city and soon Donna had become part of a group of women who went on hiking and ski trips.
She’d been having such a good time, she didn’t really notice how much she’d been away from the farm until one evening in late July.
“Want to come along on a crop tour?” Dale had asked.
“Sorry, I can’t. I promised Jen I’d meet her at the lake to help her practice with her kayak before our river trip.”
“River trip?” Dale said. “I didn’t know you were going on a river trip. That’s too bad. You really should see these soybeans. They look great.”
“Soybeans! You planted soybeans?” Donna said.
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Donna had meant to pass on her role to give Elaine a chance to get involved in the farm. She hadn’t meant to get so far removed from the operation that she didn’t even know what they had in the ground.
That very night, she’d called Jen to reschedule so she could go out with Dale and look at the crops.
“This is really nice,” Donna said, grateful that she’d taken time to spend the evening with her husband.
“Sure is! Best canola crop I’ve seen here in years!” Dale answered. Then he laughed. “I’m just kidding. I’m glad to spend some time out here with you too. We need to find more for you to do around here.”
But what? She couldn’t take back the jobs she’d given up.
An answer came during harvest.
“I can’t be out in this field all day,” Donna’s father-in-law Ed announced to his surprised son and grandson one morning, not long before lunch. “I have important phone calls to make. I don’t have a whole day for this project. I’ll get my business done and come back later.” Dale and Jeff were stunned. But when they saw Ed limping heavily between the combine cab and the truck, they understood the real reason Ed needed a break, and also why he was so miserable about it. He was exhausted, and in pain.
“Guess we worked Grandpa too long yesterday,” Jeff said.
“That hip must be giving him more trouble than he wants us to know,” Dale said. “We should have figured that out sooner.”
“We still wouldn’t have got him out of the cab before he was ready. Not without the Jaws of Life,” Jeff half-joked. “But now what do we do?”
Not wanting to offend Ed by implying that he wasn’t up to a full-time job, Dale and Jeff hadn’t tried very hard to find someone to work on the farm. One of the neighbours had promised to help out the year before, but when he’d sprained his ankle on the first day, he’d never come back. Other years, Elaine had put in some time helping during harvest, but with a four-year old and a new baby, that wasn’t a great option.
With Dale swathing canola and Jeff running the grain cart and moving augers, they were stuck for someone to run the combine. Dale and Jeff put their heads together and called a few potential prospects, but they came up empty. Eventually Dale phoned home. “Donna, you’ve been spending time in town. Do you know someone who could help out?”
“Let me give it some thought,” she’d said.
But instead of thinking about it, Donna had changed her clothes, packed a lunch and headed out to the field. And that’s how she became the Hanson’s fill-in combine operator.
Dale and Jeff weren’t convinced at first.
“You don’t even like driving my one-ton truck!” Dale had said.
“You know there’s a lot of computers in a combine cab, right Mom?” Jeff asked.
It wasn’t something she’d done before. She had always been run off her feet with kids, meals and paperwork. But after challenging herself on snowshoes, in a kayak, with a photography class and even on a snowboard over the past two years, Donna was sure she was up to it.
“I’ve been running a computer since you went off to kindergarten,” she told her son. “Now step aside and let me into that cab.”
She had most of the controls figured out by lunchtime and was getting used to listening to the sound of the rotors. By one o’clock, she’d mastered the yield monitor and was even managing not to plug the combine when she was picking up the large awkward piles of canola the swather had left behind in spots around the field.
“We’ll have to get your dad to quit leaving beaver huts all over the field if he’s going to get good help!” she told Jeff.
By two o’clock, Donna had already taught herself how to run the satellite radio, and Jeff left her alone in the cab so he could haul canola to the bins.
At four-thirty, Donna was unloading canola on the go, something Ed had never been comfortable doing. “Nobody better tell Grandpa about this,” Jeff said.
But it was too late.
A well-rested Ed had just driven out from town. He pulled up at the approach to the field where Dale and Jeff were standing outside, watching Donna turn at the end of a swath with finesse.
“Is that Donna in that cab?” Ed asked?
“Sure is,” Dale said, surprised at how proud he felt.
“She’s doing pretty well,” Jeff added, genuinely impressed.
“Huh,” Ed said. “Step out of you chair for 10 minutes and look what happens.”
Jeff and Dale exchanged looks. Would Ed be so offended he’d drive off into the sunset with his new girlfriend, and refuse to help at all? Even with Donna on board, could they get by without Ed?
Then Ed’s cell phone rang.
“Yep… Yep… I thought that would happen,” Ed said into the phone. “Same time tomorrow would work good. I’ll catch you at this end.” He put his phone back in his pocket.
“Women. Donna wants to go out boating with some girlfriend or some darn thing. Guess I have to get back to work.”
With that, Ed got in his truck and drove to the edge of the field, to wait for his turn.
Leeann Minogue is the editor of Grainews, a playwright and part of a family grain farm in southeastern Saskatchewan.
