Posted by Holly at June 26th, 2007

A Little House Moment

I always thought it was something of a Little House on the Prairie fiction concocted for its 20th century audience that women were so highly regarded and, in fact, not a second thought given that they were women when conducting the commerce of daily life.  I’m finding it may be true.  A lot of the women I know around here are in business with their husbands, whether it’s keeping the books or the house or talking knowledgeably about the farm.  So there is something about how I am taken seriously when I’m doing something farmward for Jim.  Maybe it’s the urgency of farming commercially – or of anything, really – that doesn’t leave enough time to think about whether it’s a woman or man on the other end of the phone or the other side of the counter having to solve a problem at that moment.  And most of farming does seem to be solving what comes up at the moment.

          The other night, as I was cooking dinner involving peapods and artichoke I had just plucked from our garden (not in the same dish), and Jim was bringing in the horses, he landed at the kitchen door in a state because one of the horses had eaten through the pipe feeding water to one of their pasture troughs and Lake Witte was rapidly forming.  He had to turn off the water to the house; hence, his fly-by at the kitchen.  He was not happy.  I went out to see if I could help and found him in the shop pawing through crates filled with spare pipe, valves, spigots, big cans of blue glue.  He couldn’t find the valve out in the pasture although he was sure it was there so he was searching for a replacement and couldn’t find that either in the size he needed.  We stormed the pasture anyway because he was sure it was out there somewhere and he started digging.  He found where the pipe had broken off after the horses pulled on the tubing enough, dug a little deeper and said the valve had to be somewhere nearby.  I looked around and it was right there, near Danny’s foot.  Danny is the racehorse who wouldn’t, the one who turned around and headed back to the gate in his first appearance at the track.  He’s a big guy, beautiful and sweet to people but he does like to poke in places he shouldn’t.  I don’t know how you tell a horse not to pull on rubber piping in any way that makes sense to them so, there are horse mishaps.  Just today, coming in from the vineyard at lunch, Danny got out of the pasture and into the vineyard by pulling the chain through the gate and he was preparing for an alfresco lunch of grapes. 

          Anyway, there was the valve but unusable so Jim asked if I would go to Ace hardware in town and pick up another one – oh, and four 1” diameter washers and a retaining ring for the mower.  (It’s a big mower, by the way, not the kind you see in commercials with the nice family on a Saturday taking care of their very neat and precise lawn.  This one is for the pastures and the 10 acre vineyard.  It’s heavy-duty.)  So I turned off all the heat on the stove and took off for Ace.  Now Ace is interesting.  When I first moved to Seattle, I was living in an area that used to be an old neighborhood but was in the middle stage of having become an upscale place to live.  There are cute coffeehouses and shops, bookstores, lots of restaurants and very few of the services you would find in an old neighborhood.  The Ace there had morphed into something called CityPeoples which sells all the gardening stuff you would need if you were an in-city gardener, useful household tools and items as paint and paintbrushes, and also tableware, linens, toys, candles and clothes.  My father, who literally spent his life in the paint/wallpaper/hardware business because my grandparents owned a paint and wallpaper store in Ozone Park in Queens and then he worked in the business for all of his working life, loved – LOVED – to visit me and go to CityPeoples.  He would say he just couldn’t get over a hardware store that sells dresses.  He would stand at the paint counter and talk to the clerks who mixed up paint colors from an electronic dispenser and stirred them in electric mixers and he would talk about the old days of mixing paint.  Then he would wander around with me and look at the clothes and the little decorative stuff you could buy for your coffee table.  There were always a couple of older clerks in the store, hangovers from an earlier incarnation, and my dad could often get a smile from them with a remark that made them realize he knew the evolution.

          I think he would have liked our Forest Grove Ace a lot more just because all of the clerks seem to be hangers over from the original days of the store.  I’ve also heard one of the register clerks talking about when her grandfather owned the store so it’s still in transition from a family business to a more anonymous presence.  There’s a fair amount of tension between the older clerks.  There’s the skinny guy whose eyesight is not so great and he has to get way down on his knees to read the labels of things displayed on the bottom shelves.  He always loudly mutters about one of the others who, he says, should put the stuff people always ask for on a higher shelf.  Then he’ll make a point of going off to find that guy and give him an earful about it.  There’s the guy who has spent a lot of time at the farm table and needs big red suspenders to hold up his old jeans that hug the bottom of his belly.  He’s pretty cheerful and ambles around the store looking for whatever it is you need if you seek his help.  In fact, he’s the one who helped me when I went to buy the valve.  Now, it’s pretty clear I don’t really know what it is I’m talking about.  I can keep the image of what my husband needs for about as long as it takes to buy it, but I don’t have the internal knowledge Jim has of how things work nor do I have the instinct to follow a pipe in the pasture or a bar in the mower to its connection point to see what might be the problem so I can usually walk into a store and ask for something and be okay if they have the exact thing or as long as they don’t ask me a question like, well do you have the dadadadadada to go with it?  The what?  Then I’m only a few seconds from having to call Jim on his cell on his knees in the pasture.

          In spite of that, and this is the thing I was struck by that got me to thinking about Little House, is that they all take me seriously as a working farmer and all they are trying to do is get the job done, find the part, talk about the problem we’re having.  In person I make it harder for them to take me seriously because I know I get that bemused look in my eyes about how ridiculous it is to think I would know a washer from a retaining ring.  On the phone is another story.  We have blackberries – about 18 tons of them last year, minus the ones I ate every day on the way down to the mailbox.  Last year Jim sold them to a fruit company that, in turn, contracts with the big makers of jams, jellies and syrups.  The berries are about 10 days away from this year’s harvest – a big undertaking that lasts about six weeks and involves a lot of people and big equipment.  So Jim started calling around to see where he was going to sell them and what this year’s price per pound would be.  Things are different this year.  It turns out the big buyers are going offshore to buy their berries – Chile, Peru – and there are few places who want berries grown locally so the price is way down from last year.  (Right now, I’m not going to talk about all the questions of economy and the state of the local farmer or free enterprise or impact on the globe by such decisions to buy offshore but they are very much on my mind.)  So I got a list of the local buyers from the Oregon Blackberry and Raspberry Commission and I started calling around.  Jim gave me enough of the basic information so I could represent what we have.  What amazed me was that there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation; people wanted to know the name of the farm, how many acres, what was the spray report like, was I seeing any worms, how much had I irrigated, was I going to spray again before they were picked, were they hand or machine picked.  I think they were asking me the same questions they would have asked a real farmer and I know it’s in my mind that I’m not and that I’m female but I think it still bears mentioning that when you are dealing with the partnership of sustaining the world through the hand to hand work you do with the earth and what it can produce, gender doesn’t matter.  People are just people trying to make a go of it in an environment that has daily problems as small as a valve in a pasture and as big as the price of your crop being 60% of what it was the year before.  That’s why I don’t think it was such a fiction in Little House that Charles and Caroline made decisions together about where they lived and how they raised their family and that the role women played building their homestead and the community at large is rightly depicted.  Where the gender distinction distortion began is something about which I am less and less sure.  I am sure that when it is a matter of viewing civilization through the eyes of all the communities large and small in all the corners of this earth, we are simply people and our job is to work side by side.