The farmer's wife

(I was fairly sure that a Facebook post that I made earlier on this day would evolve into the poem for the day. It had what I felt were rhythm, humor, and pathos. What was uncertain was a title. As I thought titles, my memory called up the childhood song "Farmer in the Dell" and the line "The farmer had a wife." We don't know much about the wife. A lot of good fiction of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is based on the stories of characters mentioned but never given a face or a name, much less a voice. Hopefully, this poem doesn't take anything away from the farmer -- who works very very hard. Hopefully, it just puts forth a story of the wife.)

The Farmer's Wife
This day did not unfold as I had planned for it to. 
Three baby goats were born to one mother last night.
This meant the farmer got a crash course
in learning how to teach one to drink 
-- not from an udder but from a bottle. 

I decided I would work from home today, 
thinking I could help the farmer 
and attack the mountain of to dos that lay ahead of me 
in front of the fire,
having forgotten that he might be too busy to build a fire,
having forgotten that workplace activities were rife today --
the two major monthly meetings that I'm expected to attend,
oops, forgot all about them.

At home, I fretted and futzed,
and thought an invite I'd gotten
to join a board for an organization with a mission that I cared about deeply.
I washed dishes and
shelled Painted Mountain corn from 2014 that we will eat through 2016 and maybe beyond and
thought about farming for the next seven generations.
Meanwhile, the little runt kid shivered in the barn
so we held her to give her our body warmth and 
wrapped her in a "baby goat sweater"
made from the sleeve of an old sweatshirt. 

Tonight we will eat leftovers of a chicken we raised ourselves
and make a toast to our lives as farmers.
Perhaps we might also make a toast to being a professor,
to the sixth anniversary of joining the radical college 
where I work my "day job."
That work will resume tomorrow.

What a road we have run.