SPOILER ALERT: This post will probably only be funny to my six zany sisters and my equally nutty brother but alas, after reading through a forwarded email my sister Beth received entitled "You May Be a Farmer's Wife If...", I figured I'd do my own adaptation as an ode to my Pops - The One and Only "Farmer Bill"
You Might Belong to Farmer Bill If:
1. You walked thousands of miles of soybeans all while trying to wear the least amount of clothes possible so you could work on your tan...and wound up with a doozy of a summer sock tan nonetheless.
2. You watched Farmer Bill fall asleep in his chair in the evening with his "Hog Farmer Today" magazine. When you would wake him up and tell him he ought to go to bed, he'd snort awake, turn a page in his magazine, vow he wasn't sleeping, he was just "resting his eyes" and promptly fall back asleep.
3. You swallowed a bug at max velocity while you were riding in the bed of the pickup truck pretending you were Kate Winslet in "Titanic".
4. Your date nights ended with a goodnight kiss accompanied by the smell of hog manure if the westerly winds were just right.
5. Your make out sessions with boyfriends were interrupted by the "tink" of pitchfork tines on the car window and your dad lowering his voice six octaves to let your date know it was time to "call it a night".
6. Your dad's wardrobe consists of items all labeled with seed corn company logos.
7. You hurriedly whispered to your dad at the side of the 4-H Hog Show ring to point out your show hog since you hadn't bothered to work with the hog all summer long. And you should have known which one was yours because, as a former confinement hog, it went bucking into the ring, circled several times, and promptly pooped on the judge's shoe.
8. You learned to drive stick shift by barreling down field waterways in the black Ford pickup truck.
9. Anyone seeing you in your designer suit and high heels at the company board meeting would be shocked to learn you can double fist vaccination syringes and "process" (code word for remove the manhood from the boy piglets) hogs. And how you are tempted to repeat the procedure on the horses patoot in the meeting who keeps using words like "synergy" and "win-win situation".
10. You know the difference between a gilt, a sow, a boar, and a barrow.
11. The maddest you ever saw your dad was when he was sorting hogs. But somehow, the worse thing he called the infernal creatures was "shyster".
12. You tried to pressure wash your sibling at close range to see if the epidermis could really be removed, and were rewarded with a howl and a lingering red mark on your sibling's appendage.
13. You know that a "honey wagon" does not really haul honey.
14. You joined FFA because the guy-to-girl odds were CLEARLY in your favor...and you faked your way through lots of "Supervised Agriculture Experience (SAE)" projects to keep from having your cover blown.
15. You watched your dad's steely determination to outbid everyone in the room for you at an FFA Labor Auction as your mom was wildly flapping her arms and making throat cutting motions (evidently because of the fear that dad would end up bankrupt against the Powerful Neighboring Farmer if he didn't stop bidding). PS Dad - I would have worked for you for free.
16. You put on your "feety pajamas" after your bath, then went cross country skiing on carpet and tried to build up enough static electricity to shock your dad by touching his arm.
17. Your dad still has permanent divots in his shoulder from where your chin rested as he sat on the floor by your bed and read from "The Picture Bible" every night.
18. You know how to make "hospital corners" on your top bed sheets because of Dad's military experience.
19. The jingling of pliers still reminds you of the only forewarning we got that Dad was heading up the stairs to lift us out of bed by one ankle and swat us for snickering and playing around when we should have been going to sleep.
20. You still remember the stories he told about "Middie and Shaddie" and the hapless bear that was repeatedly bitten in the rump.
Happy Father's Day, Farmer Bill!
1 comment:
OH MY!!!!! Thanks for the hilarious, and very true, walk down memory lane. I was just telling someone the other day how we would try to lay really quietly in bed on bean-walking mornings thinking, "Out of all the kids, maybe he will forget to come get ME this morning." (This never happened.)
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