Lesson
49
The
caring yet practical perspective of farmers
From that time, my sister was not
tagged to be a farmer because she was seen as too sensitive and squishy for the
necessary dispatching of livestock. I, too, was not farmer material
because I, on the other hand, did not seem to care enough for animals. We
learned at an early age that farmers need a perfect blend of caring and
practicality. Farmers should also have a sense of humour, and great farmers
know how to share these characteristics with others.
By all these measures, Marsha Boulton
makes a great farmer, even though farming was not her first career choice.
Sometimes caring, sometimes practical, and always seeing the humour in our
presumptions about farm life, the 1996 Leacock Medal winner could also
communicate it all well.
Letters
from the Country, the medal-winning work, describes the routine events of
rural life in central Ontario with the amusement and awe of someone who came
from the city. Boulton moves to the farm after years of glamour as editor of
the “People” section of Maclean’s
magazine, where she had spent her days interviewing “celebrities, actors,
writers, musicians, poets and politicians.” Her farm stories read like a series
of reports to former colleagues and friends in a magazine article / CBC feature
kind of way.
Her transition to the farm was not
direct or obviously preordained. Although her book mentions a brush with
cancer, it doesn’t link this to the change in lifestyle.
The practicality and caring combo
comes through clearly in reports on her sheep. She shears the wool, cleans
hooves, and measures scrotums. She oversees hundreds of births, cradles young
lambs in her arms until they fall asleep, clears their noses, and helps them
wean. Then, she takes pride in seeing her babies listed as “Lamb from Marsha
Boulton’s farm” on the menu of Toronto restaurant Bistro 990.[1]
Although she identifies herself as a
shepherd, and her sheep are the most common subjects of her stories, Boulton’s
collection covers a range of rural experience from snakes to porcupines and
cats to cucumbers. Non-farmers learn that geese have bad breath, turkeys are so
dumb they drown while drinking rain, hermaphrodite sheep are money-makers, and
chickens caught in flypaper are hard to manage. Anyone from a rural area will
nod at her stories about skunk encounters and deals at local auctions.
She says rural experience has a dark
side, too. It includes vandalism and theft beyond worm rustling, mailbox
smashing, and Christmas tree thieving. But Boulton mitigates these stories with
an ambiance of caring for two-legged animals, her neighbours and friends. She
can even see humour in that practical, caring construct.
“City people often live under the
fantastical notion that the kindly farmer always has room for another dog,”
Boulton says with charity toward the practice of dog dumping. “When they have
an unwanted puppy, they drive out into the country and drop the animal off near
the end of a laneway for the kindly, anonymous farmer to find.”
Of course, before someone finds the
puppy, it has to dodge traffic, hawks, and other hazards. If the dumped puppies
and kittens live long enough, they join other wild animals that harass the
livestock. This usually means that “the kindly farmer ends up having to get out
the varmint gun” and do the practical thing.
Boulton wrote this book about a decade
after her move to the country, and while her writing, radio work, and editing
of a local history suggest she could not leave her first self behind entirely,
you get the feeling that she has settled on the farm for good.
I am glad that no one told Marsha
Boulton that she was not suited to farming, or if they did, she ignored them.
She certainly seems better suited to living and celebrating the two-pronged
requirements of rural life than either my sister or me.
Writing Exercise
Write a story about
farmers who leave their unwanted livestock in the city assuming that urban
dwellers will figure out a way to deal with them.