oceancat11

As much as I may complain about how tired my job leaves me, how it makes me get up late and how by the time I drag my exhausted ass back home it’s dark out and I can’t do much but eat dinner and go to sleep and do it all again in the morning, this really is my favorite month of the year to work there.

I love getting there first thing and driving the payloader out to the field with a bin of pumpkins on the forks, to spread among the rolled-down oats, getting ready for the group of schoolkids to arrive to go for a hayride and learn how pumpkins grow. They’re not city kids, so it shouldn’t really be too far out of their world, but I still love that “Oh!” moment when they realize that little seed in their hand turns into that big Atlantic Giant on the table, with a little help from sun, rain, bumblebees, and Farmer Jack, of course.

That early in the morning, there still might be a little bit of fog left on the fields, and there’s almost certainly some crows hanging around the dead tree at the edge of the woods, standing out black against the gray sky. Once the pumpkins are laid out among the oats it looks just like they grew there, if you didn’t know any better, which the little kids really don’t. Instant pumpkin patch.

I love warming up the tractors, listening to them sputter to life in the cold morning, and letting them run until the chug and rattle of the diesel engine is steady. I love the first hayride of the year, finding out what route my boss has picked this season, plowing through the nine-foot-tall sorghum on a path that’s not quite defined yet, remembering which tractor has the jumpy clutch and which one needs the throttle open wider so it doesn’t stall. I love driving the second tractor of the caravan for big groups, far enough back so the kids in my haywagon feel like their on their own adventure, but close enough that I don’t lose sight of the other wagon among the sorghum, so I know which way the path turns next. I love when we make it out to the pumpkin patch and cut the tractor engines and there’s that half-second of still fall air while the kids peer with wide-eyed wonder over the wagon slats, out across the sea of rolled oats and pumpkins. There’s not a whole lot of wide-eyed wonder left in the world. Then the kids climb down off the wagons and the quiet is broken by laughter and little voices and delighted shrieks, and, with the littlest ones, sometimes a bit of crying if someone’s taken a tumble, or has been reminded by their teacher that they can only take one pumpkin, and not two. Somehow those moments make me forget that I don’t really like kids all that much. Sometimes a flock of wild geese will fly over, or we can hear turkeys calling in the woods – if we’re lucky we’ll glimpse some of the turkey flock on our ride back out. I love that not too long ago I was a city girl, and now, on these days in October, I am The Girl Who Drives The Tractor.

I love when we run the free hayrides for families on the weekends, and the dads ask questions about the tractors, and I can answer them; just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t know anything about tractors. (This feeling is similar to the one at Christmastime when the dads pick out a tree on the lot and realize I am the one who’ll be running the chainsaw to cut it to size.)
I love all the different kinds of pumpkins and gourds and squash that we grow. They have such fun and ridiculous names: Turk’s Turban and Mexican Hat, Red Warty Thing, Autumn Wings, Jack-Be-Little, Pokemon, Hubbard and Cinderella and Fairy Tale. There’s Snake gourds and Penguins and Swans and Birdhouse gourds. Caveman’s Club. Baby Boo and Baby Pam and Ironsides. My favorite is Long Island Cheese.

I don’t even mind the days when all I do is drive the dump truck the seven miles to and from the home farm, bringing loads of mums to sell at the stand. My boss’ 70-year-old aunts, who are twins, have been tending the mums since May, thousands of them, every color you can think of. These same aunts pick all the pumpkins, too, and they invariably make me hope I’m still that mobile when I’m 70. I hop up in the back of the dumper and they hand me up mums and before I know it I’ve got a full load and I’m driving back east, seven miles to unload and turn around and do it all again. But I love it.

(If anyone's interested, this entry is also crossposted to my MySpace page: www.myspace.com/oceancat11. Can you guys believe my MySpace/LJ experiment is almost a year old?)