Luck

Last week I was chatting with a young woman. 

Everything is relative. She's young in the sense that she's half as old as I am. 

She has a daughter about to head off to college. I complimented her on the splendid human being she raised, and she said, “Yeah, I got lucky.” 

Maybe she did. But I told her this story anyway. 

A few decades ago, we had brutal spring weather, much like the weather this year. The rainstorms came close enough together that planting was almost impossible, and the clock was ticking as to whether it was going to be a lost year. 

Farming has changed since those days. With GPS and all the other technological advances, along with the fact that most farms are too big to be one man shows, it's relatively common to see tractors in fields all hours of the day and night, farmers and their employees working in shifts. Not then - not on our farm. My father was about 80 and trying to trim his work week to 50 or 60 hours, our son was in the Marine Corps, and I'd quit raising hogs, so our employees had left for other jobs. It was down to just me and I felt it every day. 

We finally got a break in the weather and tractors started to churn. But it was no time to relax. Watching the weather, it was easy to see another front developing. It was one of those big, implacable systems we get every now and then. Starting in the Rocky Mountains, stretching from Canada to Mexico and moving about a hundred miles a day - it was enough to ratchet the blood pressure up to record levels. Every day I got up early, worked late, and checked the weather forecast religiously. As I got close to getting all the crop in the ground, I worked all night. I ran out of soybean seed about 3:00 a.m. with just a few acres left and climbed into my pickup to fetch four more bags from home. I drove pretty slowly because I was a little punch drunk, but I was awake enough to see the flicker of lightning on the western horizon. I finished about 5:00, drove home and parked the equipment. Then I went to bed. When I closed my eyes, I kept seeing the endless rows in my tractor headlights, so I was awake enough at 7:00 to hear it start sprinkling. By 9:00 it was full out raining. It rained off and on for a week and no one got back into the field for a couple weeks after that. 

About the time the beans started poking through the surface, I ran into a neighbor of mine in town. He said, “You must be the luckiest guy in the world.” 

Several comments came to mind and I didn't say any of them, at least not out loud. 

Here's the thing. There's a lot of luck in this world, good and bad, in farming and in raising children. I'm more than willing to say that personally I've had my share of good luck. 

But it's not all luck, and I thought it was something that young mother deserved to hear. 

Copyright 2024 Brent Olson