Farm to Family Connection - Commentary

FARM TO FAMILY COMMENTARY
---Select commentary from a weekly column by Curt Arens published in the Cedar County News, Hartington, NE

January 2010

Winter Fun and Games

Dear Friends,
Alright, all of you who were dreaming of a white Christmas, raise your hands. That’s what I thought. There were a bunch of you. Well, stop dreaming already. You got your wish, over and over again.

Everyone who can now say that they survived the great Christmas blizzard of 2009 is complaining about the season that has just come upon us. We haven’t had these piles of snow around for very long now, but we’ve already grown tired of pushing, shoveling, blowing and driving through the white stuff. We are already tired of Winter.

With memories of the Winter of 1968 coming back to haunt us, most folks realize that our lives are just too busy. We schedule ourselves so tightly these days, that there just isn’t time to fit in a blizzard. There are too many basketball games we might miss. There are too many social activities and trips to the mall or the local stores that we might not be able to fit in. There are places to go. There are people to see. No one has time for a blizzard.

But, the blizzard came anyway, and we’ve had a few inches of flurries pile up since then. So whether we like scheduling things around a blizzard or not, Mother Nature continues to prove to us who is really in charge.

Most folks are wondering how we ever got along in those long, hard winters of the late 1940s, the late 1960s and early 1970s without front-wheel assist tractors, big front-end loaders and snowblowers. In 1968, we were milking over 50 cows and pushed all of the snow from the farmstead with a Super M Farmall tractor and an old loader.

How did we ever survive? There was no satellite TV or advanced weather imagery to alert us of the next blizzard. We had no cell phones to keep us in constant contact with others while we were on the road. How did we make it?

The answer is pretty simple. People stayed home. Students stayed in town during the weekdays so they could get to school. Folks didn’t schedule themselves to death. They worked and played around the farm and the home, and everyone made it just fine.

My children have found in the last weeks that snow is awesome. They love throwing it at each other and me. They like carving out snowmen and women, making snow forts and snow angels and playing king of the mountain on the snow hills being pushed up around our place.

The folks who haven’t had the opportunity to get their snowmobiles out and about in recent years should welcome the big snow. Folks are finding their sleds, ice skates and cross country skis, and we’re learning how to enjoy Winter again.

Deep snow is something we don’t often have the opportunity to enjoy. Of course, for farmers, big snow is a big pain. It makes chores more difficult and it is a challenge in caring for livestock.

But hopefully, before this Winter is finished, even us farmers will find time to get into a good old-fashioned snowball fight with the kids. If you can’t beat it, enjoy it.