The Farmer’s Daughter
By Bob Stevens
These past two weeks have been a difficult winter. Not because we received our whole winter’s worth of snow in one week, but because of what shoveling that much snow has done to my manly ego. The first part of my problem was my own fault. When we were designing our house I chose “look and convenience” over careful engineering. That is why our garage is detached and sits several feet west of the back door of our home so that it can help shelter the deck that spans the large area between the garage and the house. It is also why the roof is metal with a slope steep enough to let it automatically shed its accumulated snow without any effort on my part. But, and that is a big but, because I chose to orient the roof away from dumping snow on the ground in front of our garage doors on the north, it now dumps it on the very deck that I thought I was sheltering.
During this past series of storms I went out during each break in the weather and shoveled the accumulated snow off the deck so that it wouldn’t get too deep to manage. Sometimes it was four inches, sometimes it was twelve, but I faithfully cleared it during every break in the storm, as any real man would do for his woman. And then as I had finished the last cleanup and was resting, I heard the sound that signals the beginning of an avalanche. It begins with a swoosh, followed by a rumble, followed by a WHOMP which is the sound of a lot of snow falling ten feet from the garage roof and compacting into a gigantic brick of compressed snow on the deck that I had just shoveled clean. In this case it was nearly four-feet deep near the garage from whence it fell, and almost two-feet deep out in the middle of a very large deck.
Now comes the second part of my problem. Like the first part, the second part is also my own fault. Sixty-three years ago I became smitten with the farmer’s daughter who is now Ann, my wife. I admit I was warned by my friend Tommy who was dating Ann at the time and who I would have to out maneuver to have any chance at all of eventually marrying her. Tommy told me that he was never able to run fast enough to open the car door for Ann because she always got there ahead of him and opened the door for herself. Farmers’ daughters, you see, are used to working hard right along with the men in their life and they often don’t see any difference between man’s work and woman’s work. That is fine when the man needs help getting the hay in before it rains, but it doesn’t seem as fine to the man when he finds that he is expected to come in from the corral and wipe the dishes.
And that brings me to my recent dilemma requiring me to clear the gigantic, compacted snow, brick that was resting there on our back deck waiting for the man in our house to remove the snow for his woman. I need to explain that when a man is doing manly stuff and nobody is looking, he secretly lets out a groan with every shovel full and will occasionally stop as though he is sizing up the remainder of the job, during which time he is actually trying to catch his breath and check to see if he is having a heart attack. In this instance, however, Bob the muddled male found himself being outpaced by the farmer’s daughter who was flinging snow left and right without taking any time out that would allow him to check for a heart attack. So I said, as I snuck around the corner of the house, “I am going out to the front deck to see if we need to shovel that too.” But what I really did was to hurry out of sight, lean against the house, check my pulse, and gasp for air. When I had composed myself I went back around to the rear of the house only to find the farmer’s daughter still flinging snow without any sign of tiring.
While the rest of you are praying for more snow to replenish our aquifer, I am praying for rain because it doesn’t have to be shoveled. It is really tough when a man has to admit he has been outworked by a girl. And for those young men out there who find themselves falling for a farmer’s daughter, you better make certain that you are healthy and in shape if you expect to keep up
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