Well, this is a day to prove Grandfather's contention, "The more machinery you have the more work there is to do."
It is an early April evening and men all over the neighborhood are still working. Supper is over and the dishes done, and when you step out on the porch you find the air a-hum with the drone of tractors, and the lights hover over the fields in all directions. The season opened up two or three weeks earlier than it did last year, and the oats and clover will be mostly in the ground before the night grows quiet and those fireflies settle down.
A generation ago farmers worked from dawn to dusk -- they couldn't work longer because they had no way to light the work and the horses couldn't stand any longer hours. A generation ago you would not have heard much but the creak of the windmills this late in the evening. The farmers, true to the adage, would have gone to bed with the chickens. And here they are, with all the modern inventions, laboring far into the night to get the crops in. The machines can go on indefinitely, and the men can take turns to keep the work going steadily on.
But don't for a minute think of them as slaves to the land. They are enjoying themselves. If you were close enough, you could probably hear every one of them whistling or singing -- seems to me I even hear one of them in the distance giving a yodel. I doubt if you could find any group anwhere in the world more contented and satisfied with with what they are doing right now. They are out in those fields because they want to be, not because they are driven. There would be other days to sow that seed -- but the season opened early and favorably and they want to do their part to help it along. Planting weather came along just right, not too early, not too late. And they start this crop with the unexpressed but exhilarating feeling that this may be The Year, the year when everything will go just right and every farmer can show what he and his land can really do when the chips fall right. No late frosts or early freezes, neither flood nor drought, showers in the night so we can work in the day, strong sun so you can hear the crops grow, no insect pests, big yields -- everything just so.
When the season starts too late, cold and wet, we work harder than ever with the hope that things will be better later on; when it comes too early, we say to ourselves, look out, we'll pay for this, be on guard. But when it starts like this, we think This is It! So all together, everybody -- here we go! -- Hope.
Memory Gem
Life is something like an artichoke, you pull out the leaf and only the tip is edible.