The Day I Was A Real Farmer

I will admit the last two weeks at Farm Hands have actually been kind of boring for me. I mean, being there is still beautiful and relaxing but I was tasked to man the barnyard. This involves wandering about answering people's questions and making sure no one steals eggs (or chickens) from the chicken coop. Seriously. I've been told it happens. So this week when they told me I would be helping the farmers bring in the wheat I was ready for it. They cut the wheat and bundle it using this crazy looking old contraption that bundles the wheat into shocks. They are large, loosely tied bundles of wheat and they get stacked in piles leaning together so they can dry in the sun. Once dry, they have to be picked up and stacked which is what we did. When I got to the field, the farmer gave us a speech about how to handle a pitchfork. Well, I can handle a pitchfork if it involves, say, moving hay the floor to a wheelbarrow. But using one to throw a big shock of wheat to the top of a stack while not impaling the guy catching it? Well, that's a bit more intimidating. The first several rows we stacked by hand and that was just the warm up. After a while, the stack got so high that I couldn't possibly throw them up by hand. I had to master the pitchfork. The first shock fell short, but the second one made it up, barely. Once I caught on, I wanted to do a happy dance every time one made it up. The farmer kept going on about how we were the best help he'd had for that job in 5 or 6 years, but I didn't feel too proficient. By the end, we were just exhausted and the stack was so high it was all we could do to just get the bundles to the top of the stack. The good news is no one got impaled, and I am not as sore as I anticipated I would be this morning. Oh, and we didn't lose a single shock off the stack on the way to the barn! There was another Farm Hands dad helping and we decided that we both were real farmers for the day. Like, real pitchfork-wielding ninja farmers...or at least that's how it felt!