PITCHIN’ HAY, SHOVELIN’ SNOW

DECEMBER 2, 2019 – With the onset of another winter—my first under Medicare—I have again resisted buying a snowblower.  My reasons are several.  First, our garage is a “Democrat Garage,” meaning, in line with my informal and years’-long survey, it’s too chock full of stuff (in addition to a motor vehicle) to accommodate another piece of machinery.  Second, I’m philosophically opposed to acquiring any more stuff. Third, my mix of Swedish/Scottish frugality precludes a major purchase in high season.

But my over-arching reason for doing without a snowblower is I like to pretend I’m going back to my agricultural roots. I say “my”roots, because really, every single one of us has ancestral ties to the farm.  In my case, my grandmother had grown up on a farm in Sweden.  To avoid (unsuccessfully) the draft during World War I, my grandfather, who grew up in Minneapolis, bought a farm in northern Wisconsin. Granted, I personally grew up in “the city”—Anoka, Minnesota with a population ranging over my youth from 10,000 to 13,000; a small town, really, but since my I attended Franklin Elementary School on the west side of town, most of my friends and classmates were farm kids from the hinterlands. My best friend in third and fourth grade was a city kid, but he had aunts and uncles who were farmers and he himself had enough scale model farm implements (McCormick, John Deere, and International Harvester) to qualify as a farm kid.  I played enough with those farm toys to consider myself an honorary farm kid.

So, anyway, back to snow removal . . .

After a heavy snowfall, you can hear the “farmers” around my current neighborhood (in the heart of the Twin Cities—population 2.8 million) blowing snow with their top-of-the-line, name-brand snowblowers, which I imagine are behemoth combines and corn-pickers that once sees at harvest time out in real farm country.

I, on the other hand . . . [here imagine the “ripple” device used in old TV sit-coms signaling a dream or scene imagined by a character] . . . pretend I’m a farmer in boots, denim bib overalls and a big straw hat.  I imagine I’ve got a sharp-tined pitchfork for pitchin’ hay from the field onto a horse-pulled hay wagon or from the wagon into the stalls inside my big, red, country barn.

While the “combines” on neighboring “farms” throw snow high and far, I thrust my shovel into dried hay and pitch it . . . not quite as high, not quite as far. But my gratification is much higher than the mark those snowblowers reach.

When the job is done, I lean on my shovel as if it’s my pitchfork. I smile with the self-satisfaction that I’m a hard-workin’ farmer with calloused hands. Then I thrust my shovel into the man-piled snowbank near our backdoor, and call it a job well done.

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© 2019 Eric Nilsson