A Farm Day With Mrs. Murphy

(Today's "tail" is a little wordier than usual,

but stay with it....I promise it will be worth it in the end.)

In the early days of blogs, before we lived full time at the farm,

there was a favorite one that I would read.

It was written by a woman in England....

a woman that seemed to step right out of a Jane Austin book.

She dressed in feminine frocks and wore luscious pinafores of linen.

The photos on her blog were magazine worthy,

making me imagine a romantic country life.

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I knew that if I lived on a farm, I would dress like that...

doing farm chores in long flowing dresses with beautiful aprons to protect them...

baskets of flowers on my arm...

gathering eggs and feeding horses, goats, and pigs.

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I still imagine my life to be like that,

and occasionally stage a photo shoot resembling that

for the purpose of marketing a new apron.

But reality?

Well, reality is something different altogether.

Oh, how I wish you could imagine me as some romantic heroine...

but, that would be smoke and mirrors.

And most times smoke and mirrors fail.

Never did I imagine back then, when lost in the beauty of the English countryside,

that Under Armor would serve as the mainstay of my wardrobe,

with a dirty barn jacket and muck boots to accessorize!

Reality hit home last week....and sadly there are pictures as evidence.

Here is my tail:

Meet Mrs. Murphy

It was Thursday morning, a cold and cloudy morning on the farm.

So cold that the gator wouldn't start and I had to make do...

using the truck to do morning chores (carrying water and manure buckets).

As luck would have it, during the process, the buckets slid off of the 

icy truck bed and landed upside down in the middle of the lane...

leaving me the job of again cleaning up the same manure that I had just finished picking

out of the dry lot.

By afternoon, it had warmed up enough for the gator to start,

so afternoon chores were not such a big production.

Almost.

Because we had dinner plans that evening, I did something I never do.

I set my hair in hot rolls and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head,

and headed out the door to start the work.

I had finished everything but feeding the goats.

With several cartons of freshly picked eggs, I parked the gator on the hill

between the goats and the chickens as I always do.

Off I went to the goat yard to feed the goats.

Bending over the first bowl, ready to pour feed,

I heard a sudden "thunk" from the direction of the gator.

I turned, horrified, to witness the gator rolling, driverless,

 down the hill towards the tractor shed.

The emergency brake had released on its own.

There was nothing I could do...

the world had suddenly gone to slow motion and I watched, helpless,

as my precious gator sped down the hill,

narrowly missing the tractor shed,

over an embankment ,

and into the trees.

CRASH!!!

I uttered a few choice words,
realizing that the freshly picked eggs lay cracked and broken in the dump-bed.
I also knew that the front of my go-to vehicle was gnarled, twisted and fractured.
It was.

 I ran to get the tractor from Becky who was busily mulching her bushes
with tractor buckets full of tanbark.
Becky had her camera...
and it was a good thing, too, for this sight was too funny to miss.
There I was all Ethel Mertz-like with broken eggs and crashed gator...
in my filthy barn clothes and curlers!

By that point, there was nothing left to do but laugh.
And laugh we did...
rip-roaring, pee-yourself, belly laughter.
And then I did the only thing I could do....
pulled that gator out of the woods and
called our favorite John Deere dealer Valley Ag and Turf...
who graciously brought me a loaner gator and took my dear Deere off to
the local trauma center.

The day was proof that Murphy's Law was alive and well at Bee Haven Acres.