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August 2006
In the Still of the Night
Dear Friends,
Nights on the farm are special. As a kid, I would sit in my bed late in the evenings and listen to the crickets chirping outside my window or the coyotes down by the creek howling into the night. It was interesting to hear the earth and all its creatures quiet down for the day.
The sounds around the place are different at night because different animals are out and about. In the twilight, it isn’t that unusual to see a bat flittering among the trees or to hear an owl hooting in our grove. I’m sure if I was sitting quietly near the sweet corn patch, I would actually witness the overnight picnic our stealthy raccoons usually hold up and down the rows.
Although I don’t work into the late night as much as I used to before I had a family, I still burn the midnight oil during planting, harvest and haying time. Tractors and combines work better into the night when temperatures are cooler. There is nothing like watching your breath sift into the cold night air standing on the steps of the combine and watching the unloading auger do its work with corn piling up in the truck. Working at night always gives me a feeling of getting ahead on fieldwork a little bit, so when I start up the next morning I can say that I actually accomplished something by putting in a really full workload the day before.
With a baby in the house again, sound sleep, except in increments, is sometimes hard to come by. Although Zac is getting better at night, he and I still get our fair share of watching "Leave it to Beaver" at 2 am. Sitting up with him, I notice the creaks of an old farmhouse, and if we have the windows open, we can hear the buzzing of the grain aeration fans of the neighborhood or cows bellowing out to their calves from pastures near and far.
We used to board hunters from Michigan on the farm during hunting season years ago. One of the things that kept these city guys from Detroit up at night while staying on the farm was the constant banging of hog self-feeder lids. They would wake up in the morning and tell my Dad that he was really a hard worker because they heard him out by the barn all night long. They were surprised to find that the hogs were making all the noise while taking a midnight snack. So maybe the nights around here aren’t so peaceful after all.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
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