The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
12-9-2009 column
I love the month of December. It is filled with great surprises throughout all 31 days, especially this year.
Mark celebrated a milestone birthday to start off the month. We try to do memorable things to celebrate his birthday. We went golfing on his 39th and 40th birthdays. He has trapped pocket gophers on his birthday too. Of course most December birthdays have been celebrated snuggled up on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate watching a snowstorm blow past the living room windows. This year we topped them all. We were combining very wet corn on his birthday! Neither of us thought we would ever be doing that job in December.
It would have been nice to leave some of the corn in the fields to dry, but our custom combiner needed to keep moving and wasn’t interested in coming back from Arizona later this winter to finish the job. So we scrambled to find enough storage space for the all the corn. Many trips were made to various elevators, feed mills and ethanol plants. We were able to finish just in time for the first December snowstorm.
Because the harvest season ran late, a few jobs were missed and that lead to great surprises as the temperatures dropped. Half filled water tanks were now solid ice cubes. The chippers on the silo unloader hadn’t been replaced before the feed started to freeze to the silo walls. The garden and a few fields didn’t get worked before the ground froze yet either. But the cattle sheds are bedded and ready for long cold winter nights.
The sudden change in temperatures also created a search and rescue mission in the house as well. At the end of the last winter season, I matched all of the winter gloves and stored them in a great spot that I couldn’t forget. I put all of the winter coats, hats, coveralls and winter paraphernalia away in an organized manner. (I am not an organized person, this was a New Year’s resolution I was trying to fulfill.) But Murphy’s Law is alive and residing at our house.
Why is it that when I put something in a great place that I will never forget….I forget?! At the time it made perfect sense, but my logic must be flawed. I can’t seem to make the same connections twice to remember it in the first place. We have been scrambling through tubs, closets and storage bins to find enough clothes to keep the biting wind at bay. Now I’ll have to start putting away all of the summer clothes to make room for this season’s fashion necessities.
One of my favorite surprises in December is trying to find all of the Christmas presents I have purchased throughout the year and hidden from prying eyes in great hiding spots that “I can’t forget”. I am a bargain shopper. My first stop is always the clearance rack. I don’t know if that is the farmer in me or my Scot-Irish bloodline. My dad would love to tease his mother-in-law that the Irish wanted to celebrate, but the Scot wouldn’t pay for it, unless it was on sale. Reviewing my stash of “would be gifts”, I wish I could remember what I was thinking when I picked that gift up.
I was talking with our neighbor after church last week. Karla said that she does the same thing. We both had to laugh when we discovered that we would get a gift idea stuck in our heads and end up buying the gift several times over throughout the year! It is the thought that counts, right?
The biggest December surprise for me is how the stars align to form a perfect cleaning storm. I really hate to clean, but there are three reasons that generate the need to clean and December brings them together at one time. The first is a strong desire to rearrange the furniture to make room for the Christmas tree. This was my mother’s way of getting me to clean my room when I was growing up. The second is hosting a party. You can’t have friends over if the house isn’t clean. The final reason is met on a regular basis throughout the year. Something is lost and the best way to find it is to start cleaning. I am always amazed at the other things I discover that were missing, before they went missing. Now I’ll just have to put them in a place that I can’t forget!
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As their 4 children pursue dairy careers off the farm, Natalie and Mark are starting a new adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their Minnesota farm. (Natalie grew up in Stronghurst, the daughter of Becky and the late Larry Dowell.)
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