Daddy! Which ones are mine?” Four-year-old Connor was jumping up and down in front of his grandparents’ Christmas tree. He grabbed a box wrapped in glittering Rudolf paper and held it up. “This one?”
Jeff read the tag. “This one’s for me. Let’s keep looking.”
Jeff picked up a large snowman gift bag with Connor’s name on it. “This one’s from your Grandma Donna and Grandpa Dale. You can shake it, but we can’t open any until after supper. Grandma’s rules.”
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Connor took the bag and shook it, grinning, while Jeff picked through the stack of gifts. He saw four tagged with his own name — all exactly the same shape and size. His grandfather, his mom, his wife, even his sister. He didn’t need to open them, he could guess what was inside.
His family had been polite enough not to say much about the incident since it happened back in mid-November, although Jeff was sure if his Grandpa Ed was home instead of in Arizona he would have made some comments. Jeff knew it had been his own fault; he wasn’t surprised he was going to hear about it again.
November had been perfect. A late fall. Warm weather, no snow. “We barely even need coveralls to work outside!” Jeff’s father Dale said more than once. This was the first year in a long time that the Hansons were finished harvest early enough to get to other farm work before freeze-up.
“We’re even going to get all of those soybeans through the cleaning plant before it’s too cold for them,” Dale said one morning while they were in the shop for a break. “We might even have time to take a day off this month!”
“You know what you should do,” Jeff’s Grandpa Ed said while he drank a caramel cappuccino from the machine his girlfriend had brought for the shop. “You ought to mow down those weeds at the edges of the sloughs. Especially on that west quarter. You could gain back some of the land we haven’t been able to farm since 2011.”
Most of the Hansons’ land had been too wet to seed in the spring of 2011. Since then, their sloughs were bigger than usual. They’d lost a lot of acres, and with changes to Crop Insurance, they couldn’t collect Unseeded Acreage payments on land that wasn’t in shape for spring seeding. But now that the sloughs had dried up a lot, with the cattails and weeds at the edges cut down, the Hansons could reclaim quite a few acres.
“I’d get out there myself,” Ed said, “But I’m busy getting my trailer road-ready for the trek south.”
“He’s got an idea, Jeff,” Dale said.
Jeff nodded. “Yeah. But it would take a few days. We’ve got a little extra time this fall, but maybe not that much.”
That afternoon, Jeff found Dale sweeping out the cleaning plant. “Grandpa’s right,” he said. “We should tackle those sloughs. I’ll take the combine out in the morning.”
“Really?” Dale asked. “I thought we’d use the mower.”
“I can finish twice as fast with a 40-foot header than with the 15-foot mower,” Jeff answered.
“But… do you really want to wear out the combine, when you could put the hours on a $25,000 mower instead? And there’s a lot of tough weeds out there. Are you sure you want to put them through the combine?”
“If we’re cleaning it up, we might as well do it right,” Jeff said. “The combine’ll chop up the straw better.”
Besides, Jeff figured to himself later, if he used the mower, he’d still need to put hours on the tractor to pull it. And they could earn the cost back by having that land ready to seed.
That night Dale complained to his wife Donna. “The kid doesn’t listen,” Dale said. “I’ve got decades of experience, and he wants to do everything his own way.”
“This isn’t a big deal,” Donna said. “We have to let him make decisions.”
“On a worn out combine,” Dale grumbled as he crawled into bed.
By Tuesday morning, Jeff was on his second day of slough-clearing. He was in the tractor cab, eating his roast beef sandwich a little on the early side. He could never resist a full lunch cooler. “92 acres already. And it’s only 11:00 on Day 2,” he wanted to text his dad. But he didn’t. He was trying to be mature. And he didn’t want to get mustard on his iPhone.
When he finished his sandwich and wiped his hand, Jeff snapped a quick photo of the cattails in front of the cab. “It’s like a wetland jungle out here,” he thought. Then he sent the photo to his wife Elaine with a note. “Dad said this wouldn’t work, but I’m making great time and everything’s going just fine out here.”
Then he opened his cooler again and rooted around until he found one of his wife’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. As he bit into it, he thought he noticed a strange smell. Before he had time to investigate, or even finish chewing, an alarm clanged in the cab.
He swivelled in his seat and saw a trail of flame building in a line behind the cab. At least a quarter of a mile as it bent around the slough. Cattail fluff must have built up around the engine and caught fire. Now burning embers were drifting in the light breeze.
Not only was Jeff in trouble — the field was on fire and the combine was on fire — he was also living the most humiliating moment of his life. He swallowed hard and clenched his teeth before he called his dad for help. Then he grabbed the fire extinguisher from the ladder and climbed down to get to work.
Donna drove out with more fire extinguishers while Dale took the cultivator out, disking wide circles around the slough to stop any flames that might spread from a stray spark. Luckily there wasn’t much wind, and most of the weeds were tough and damp. Jeff had most of the flames under control before there was even enough smoke to attract the neighbours’ attention.
“I’m OK,” Jeff assured his wife later. “But I singed holes right through the soles of my favourite running shoes!”
“Your dad was right,” Elaine said.
But that was the last anyone said about it. Dale was happy to be right, but also worried about the cost of fixing the combine. And Donna had threatened Dale with his life if he even imagined saying anything like, “I told you so.” Nobody mentioned it to Jeff again all fall, except to talk about who would call the dealership to have the combine hauled in for repairs, and who would finish cutting the sloughs (this time, with the mower).
But now, six weeks later on Christmas Eve, Jeff was 98 per cent sure that four boxes under the tree with his name on them held new running shoes to replace the ones he’d burned. He practised his “good sport” smile as he gathered his kids and headed to the table for his family’s Christmas dinner.
