Jeff Hanson stood in the May morning sun, eyeing up his seeding crew. “This is going to be something else,” he muttered. Mark Edwards, the Hansons’ farm employee, winked at Jeff. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Normally, Jeff, his wife, his parents and Mark worked together to get the crop in the ground during the short seeding season. But this year Jeff and Mark’s only assistants were two fifteen-year-old city kids and a part-time seventh-grader.
Jeff’s wife Elaine had been the first to go. Jeff and Elaine hadn’t paid attention when their daughter Jenny’s dance club started talking about spring competitions. Until the group booked hotel rooms in Edmonton for a whole week in May. “The other girls don’t come from farms,” Elaine said. “Jenny will have to travel with another family.”
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Jenny wasn’t pleased. “All the other moms are coming!” she said.
“Go ahead,” Jeff told Elaine. “There’s Mark and Mom and Dad and I. Connor can help after school.”
Jeff’s parents agreed. “Go with Jenny,” Donna said. “We’ll get our vacation later.” Jeff’s sister, Trina, was expecting a baby in late June. Since Trina and her husband were working and living in Germany, Dale and Donna planned to take a couple of weeks to see the country before the baby was born.
“We’ll celebrate our 40th anniversary in Hamburg,” Donna said after she’d printed out their bus tour itinerary.
“We’re going to visit a Tank Museum!” Dale said, sounding less romantic than his wife.
But in early May Trina’s husband called. The baby was early, in the German version of the NICU. Donna was terrified.
“Go,” Jeff said. He used credit card points to get her on the next flight, and Dale drove his wife to the airport. “I’ll fly over when we’re done seeding,” he said as he lifted her suitcase out of the back of the SUV.
Now Jeff was getting worried. “We’ll be fine,” Mark said. “Women. Who needs ’em?”
A few days before Elaine and Jenny left for Edmonton, Elaine’s sister phoned from Saskatoon. When she hung up, Elaine came to sit on the living room couch with Jeff. He turned down the TV and raised his eyebrows. “Everything okay?”
“No,” she said. “My sister has a sales conference in Vancouver next week. For her new job. With all the COVID restrictions, she’s never met most of her co-workers. She really needs to go.”
“Yup,” Jeff said.
“The problem is the twins,” Elaine said.
“Oh?”
“They need someone to look after them.”
Jeff was confused. “The boys are 15. Can’t they stay with friends? There’s school all day anyway.”
Elaine took a deep breath. “The twins are… on a break from school.” Then she described a complicated prank involving the school science lab, Bunsen burners, and chemicals they’d ordered online.
“Blaine and Blake aren’t bad kids. They’re curious,” she said. “And my mother can’t take them. She’s in Ecuador with a new boyfriend.”
“Oh,” Jeff said.
“So…” Elaine started out.
“But you won’t be here!” Jeff said.
“They can help,” Elaine said.
Jeff stared. “That’s a terrible idea.”
“They’re great with Connor,” Elaine said. “And they’re my family.”
Jeff couldn’t argue. Elaine had put up with a lot over the years, living with the Hansons. He couldn’t not let her nephews stay.
“Dad’s patient with kids,” he said. “We’ll get by.”
Elaine’s sister dropped the boys off on a Monday, and on Wednesday Elaine left for Edmonton.
That afternoon, when Jeff and Dale were out in the yard showing the twins how the air seeder worked, Dale’s phone rang.
“Jeff!” Dale yelled after he hung up. “It’s now!”
Jeff looked up from the hoses. “What is?”
“My knee surgery. I go under the knife Saturday morning.”
Dale had been on the knee replacement list so long he’d almost forgotten about it. With COVID delays and a big backlog, he and Donna assumed it would be at least fall before he had his surgery.
Jeff was dumbfounded. “Can you postpone it? Take the next spot?”
“Just once,” Dale said. “Then they take me off the list. And what if the next offer comes at a worse time?
Jeff hated seeing his father in pain, but he couldn’t imagine how any other time could be worse than now.
“If I go now, I’ll be running by harvest,” Dale said.
“Right,” Jeff said. “Go ahead. I’ll send flowers.”
Donna wasn’t thrilled when she FaceTimed from Germany. “How can you look after yourself while you’re healing?”
“I’ll manage,” Dale said.
Donna snorted. “I’ll call your sister. Maybe Margaret can come out from Ottawa.”
Dale did not love this idea, but he wasn’t offered a choice. Margaret arrived just in time, and soon decided that if she was cooking for Dale, she might as well cook for everyone. She even volunteered to go to town on parts runs. “I wouldn’t mind a look at the place,” she said. “It’s been a few years.”
Mark ran the sprayer, which left Jeff managing the boys. It took a few days to work out the kinks, but once all the boys understood the safety rules they worked out a routine. The twins helped Jeff keep the seed tender filled and used the side-by-side to haul bags of seed. They moved augers and started tractors. They drove out to the fields with meals Margaret cooked, pulling into the nearest approach if they saw another vehicle on the road. “Don’t tell your aunt,” Jeff ordered.
Connor, in his first year running the tractor, turned out to be an impressive rock picker. “He can spot a stone two miles off,” Jeff bragged.
On Monday after school, Connor had the driver let him off the school bus a couple of miles north of the house where Jeff had left the tractor. He got straight to work, using the rock picker to lift up rocks in the freshly seeded field and drop them into neat piles. But Connor had turned left instead of right. “The kid picked rocks off the Peterson’s wheat field until sundown,” Jeff said. “Shawn owes us one.”
The twins grumbled about being assigned to food and seed delivery instead of a tractor, but Margaret overheard them telling each other how they were having the best time ever, so Jeff ignored their complaints.
By the time Elaine got home, Dale was on crutches and the twins’ mother was on her way to pick them up. “I can’t wait to tell our friends about everything we got to drive,” Blaine said. With Elaine home and Dale walking, Margaret flew home to Ottawa, “before I wear out my welcome,” she said.
Trina’s new baby — they’d named her June — was home from the hospital, “with a healthy cry,” Donna said cryptically. Dale wanted to fly over to Germany, but Donna wasn’t having it. “They say you can barely hobble around the yard.”
Finally, Jeff finished the last pass on the last field. he parked the air seeder and walked back to the house in the twilight, the two farm dogs sniffing his pockets for treats. This wasn’t the season he’d planned, and he wouldn’t want to do it again, but they’d pulled it off.
