CE 1998 SIN
March 2001
Bullish on Mistakes Letters from the Country by Marsha Boulton
When I was in my tender twenties no one would have guessed that I would end up living on a farm. I was a downtown girl. I was high heels, not Wellington boots. But all of that changed when the saw the old yellow-brick farmhouse, set on a hill surrounded by rolling pasture and forest. I didn’t notice that I was buying a corner farmer without any fencing. I didn’t notice that the only hint of a barn was a falling-down chicken coop. When you think you have found paradise the dream becomes an envelope that seals out reality. Because I was green as a corn sprout, I made a lot of mistakes. My first summer on the farm, I was determined to earn big bucks farming. So I bought into that little advertisement you sometimes see in newspapers. It says something like: “You can earn up to $2,000 an acre growing pickle cucumbers.” All I earned was a sore back. After costs, my tally was $23.16. Oops. But after two decades on the farm, I have learned a few things. For instance, I now know that dinner is what is served at lunch time and supper is what you eat at dinner time. Lunch is a sort of snack that the “ladies” serve when the euchre game ends or the dance is over. And I have learned that I am not the first newcomer to make mistakes. For instance, a lawyer I know once bought a farm as a country retreat. The lawyer liked cows. He didn’t want to start a cattle empire. He just liked the notion of having a few cows. So he went to a neighbouring farm and bought a dozen of the colour that appealed to him. He put up the fences, and he hired a lad to care for the cows. It gave him great pleasure to see the cows grazing in his fields. Then came the question of breeding the cows. And all of a sudden, the lawyer became a farmer. “Of course, I’m having them bred,” he told the neighbours. And he asked for the name of the best bull seller around. Like a lot of city folk who come to the country, this was one urbanite who wasn’t going to let country folk tell him what to do every inch of the way. They were his cows, goll-darn-it, and he was going to see that they were bred to the best darn bulls around.