March 2021
Bullish on Mistakes
Letters
from the Country
by Marsha BoultonBut all of that changed when the saw the old yellow-brick farmhouse, set on a hill surrounded by rolling pasture and forest. I didn’t notice that I was buying a corner farmer without any fencing. I didn’t notice that the only hint of a barn was a falling-down chicken coop. When you think you have found paradise the dream becomes an envelope that seals out reality.
Because I was green as a corn sprout, I made a lot of mistakes. My first summer on the farm, I was determined to earn big bucks farming. So I bought into that little advertisement you sometimes see in newspapers. It says something like: “You can earn up to $2,000 an acre growing pickle cucumbers.” All I earned was a sore back. After costs, my tally was $23.16. Oops.
But after two decades on the farm, I have learned a few things. For instance, I now know that dinner is what is served at lunch time and supper is what you eat at dinner time. Lunch is a sort of snack that the “ladies” serve when the euchre game ends or the dance is over. And I have learned that I am not the first newcomer to make mistakes.
For instance, a lawyer I know once bought a farm as a country retreat. The lawyer liked cows. He didn’t want to start a cattle empire. He just liked the notion of having a few cows.
So he went to a neighbouring farm and bought a dozen of the colour that appealed to him. He put up the fences, and he hired a lad to care for the cows. It gave him great pleasure to see the cows grazing in his fields.
Then came the question of breeding the cows. And all of a sudden, the lawyer became a farmer. “Of course, I’m having them bred,” he told the neighbours. And he asked for the name of the best bull seller around.
Like a lot of city folk who come to the country, this was one urbanite who wasn’t going to let country folk tell him what to do every inch of the way. They were his cows, goll-darn-it, and he was going to see that they were bred to the best darn bulls around.
SINCE 1998
When I was in my tender twenties no one would have guessed that I would end up living on a farm. I was a downtown girl. I was high heels, not Wellington boots.
Even though he was a lawyer, this guy had never seen real bull in the flesh. Still, he spent a fine Saturday afternoon selecting bulls form a purebred breeder with a wall full of ribbons to show the excellence of his stock.
The lawyer bought 12 bulls for his 12 cows and ordered them delivered the following weekend. When the truck pulled up, the lad who was tending the cows was a bit disconcerted.
“You can’t put them out there, no way,” he advised as the truck eased into the pasture field where the cows were grazing.
“My cows, my bulls, nature’s way,” said the lawyer, fully believing that the boisterous boys and the comely heifers would pair off equally and go quietly into the sunset to make little cows.
Well, all hell broke loose when the gates were opened. The bulls bolted like something out of Merrill Lynch commercial – all wild and bucking, with fury in their crazed loins. The cows froze. Then the bulls decided to run at each other. After all, when a bull see a dozen cows he want to make each one his own, and he’s not about to share with his brothers.
It took six good men and three good cutting horses to straighten out the donnybrook that ensued. Some of the bulls were take to isolation stalls in other barns and the rest were tethered by nose rings in the lawyer’s barn. The cows just shook their heads in disbelief, while the neighbours wandered off with a story the knew they could supper on for the next decade. Finally, the lawyer acknowledged that maybe he had taken on more bull than he could handle.
The lad selected one of the bulls as the herd sire, and the rest were sold at auction. But the lawyer never saw the fine calves that resulted.
Aft the Great Bull Fiasco, he couldn’t even go into a supermarket without hearing whispers behind him as the story spread. He sold the farm and bought a ski chalet.