as many of you know, joanne is my mom. apart from being a dandy mother, she has spent nearly 20 years dedicated to the education of young children. i can proudly say that she did this because she loved the children, not because she needed the money. the public school system needs more people like her!!!
this year my mom retired. about two years before retiring she decided to start writing. now that she is fully retired she has plenty of time to dedicate to writing. i feel like we are seeing the fruits of her labor. she recently won second place at an idaho writers conference. Most of her work consists of short stories, both fiction and non-fiction. I have posted the short piece of work that brought her the second place prize. i love the way this story illustrates life in idaho. i grew up on the edge of a potato field, yet i am not a country boy.
please comment on my mom's writing!!!! enjoy!!!
Suburb Meets Farm
I live in a subdivision that was once part of a large productive farm in Southeaster Idaho. Streets in my neighborhood weave back and forth and turn back again to cul-de-sacs. They have names like Gleneagles, Inverness, Tapitio and Pervero. All names of golf courses.
I suppose when the farmer sold his land to developers he was torn between the large sum of money he was offered, which would afford him a comfortable retirement, and the loss of a way of live. In an attempt to not completely surrender to the encroachment of the town moving toward the once rural area, he kept a few acres of land and his house.
The new homes went up around him and gradually embraced his small holdings, yet he dug his heels in and stayed his course. The grain silo sits empty beside abandoned trucks and rusted and broken machinery. The old barn sports a bent basketball hoop that once saw countless hours of use from his sons.
Twice each summer he starts up his tractor and mows down the weeds on his unused land. But, this spring he stared up the tractor and plowed the weeds under. Several days later I hear the sound of equipment in the field. Looking out my kitchen window I see Mr. Butikofer planting. Now, by the first week of summer he has a thirsty crop of wheat. With the price of a bushel of wheat reaching skyward and the emanate loss of water rights, if not used after this year, the retired farmer has resurrected his land. In his zeal to once again make his land productive, he has forgotten that he is no longer isolated and unencumbered by neighbors.
Mr. Butikofer is now farming in the middle of a housing development. The irrigation ditch that runs behind the line of neat, white vinyl fences has been untended for a number of years. When he opens the head gate water pours into the field on one side and races toward the houses on the other.
I was the bearer of bad news---poor Mr. Butikofer. "The contractor must not have done something quite right," he tells me. Mean while the water keeps creeping ever closer to my basement windows, as well as those of the house next door. With some gentle persuasion, I finally convince the independent farmer that he needs to close the head gate.
My husband and our neighbor meet him at the head gate and have a friendly conversation about the situation at hand. Mr. Butikofer does agree that the ditch has some structural problems unrelated to the development surrounding it.
Later that evening, I once again hear the sound of machinery coming from the field. A backhoe has arrived. It is moving dirt and dumping it on the embankment of the ditch to reinforce it. The thirsty wheat must have water. The next day he again opens the head gate and most of the flow is to his field. The backyards see only a small amount of water this time.
In spite of the difficulties Mr. Butikofer has encountered, I hope he does not give in and concede defeat. I want him to hang in there long enough to see his grain come to fruit. In late August I would love to look over my white vinyl fence and see a field of gold, ripe wheat. I will try to imagine it as a large, wide open space with wind rustling through it, rather than a postage stamp encompassed by two story houses.
The suburban farmer will eventually have to acquiesce to the changing times. He like so many others has been pulled into the traffic of change. His town finally reached the boarders of his land and he gave it permission to continue on. I am sure it was not an easy decision for him to make, but in the end it was made.
We co-exist together in this process of change. He continues to hang on to a small piece of who he was and I try to carve my small niche out of the bigger piece he let to. As I attempt to grow flowers and struggle with frail trees, the rocks seem to multiply and divide before eyes. I am left to wonder how Mr. Butikofer coped with such rocky ground so many years. Perhaps, that is why he kept only a few acres. If he wants to nourish his mall patch of land a little longer I am willing to accept a little bit of his irrigation water in my flowerbeds.
