By Beth Watkins

Phone conversations between me and my country boy usually include: “When will you be home?” His answer is always, “Soon.” I’ve come to realize “soon” could mean anywhere from 30 minutes to just before dark.

City folks run their lives by clocks, calendars, and chirping apps. Out here, good old boys run on sun, seasons, and whether the tractor has oil pressure and air in the tires.

When I lived in town, I used to fuss over traffic – slow left-laners, backed-up intersections, endless red lights. Turns out, when you don’t deal with them daily, they lose their sting. These days, the only traffic backups are caused by people following hay equipment crawling down a county road. Listen up, people! We are barely moving – give your car a little gas and go around… bless your hearts.

We live where cows outnumber people, and one Saturday we rode our tractor to the little store for fuel. The only “traffic” we met was another John Deere doing the same thing.

Life may be slower, but I’ve found a new thorn in my side: procrastination. Unlike rush hour, it doesn’t come and go – it settles in like dust on a dirt road, in every nook and cranny. Out here, procrastination isn’t about laziness – it’s all strategy and timing.

In some homes, when something breaks, folks call a repairman. But in a country boy’s house, we fix it ourselves – eventually. If we can’t fix it, we don’t need it.

When approaching the subject of things left undone on the list, I try to handle it with mercy and grace. The Bible tells us in Proverbs 21:9, “It is better to live in a corner of the attic than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife.” Wise words – no one wants to live with a nag. So, I carefully, artfully, and creatively steer my “honey” toward his to-do list. I have a plethora of “carrot on a stick” type incentives. Some work like a charm. All are great ideas, but when you have a husband who works all the time, some of them are marked NA – Not Available.

You want to know how deep procrastination runs out here? Let me paint you a picture. My cabbed rake tractor lost its right-side mirror to a low-hanging branch three summers ago. I wasn’t on duty that day, so when I asked about it, I was told it was on order and would be fixed “soon.”

This year, my tractor has an automatic quitting time built in. The light switch quit working, so dark-thirty means it’s time to head to the house. I swear I had nothing to do with it – the knob just came off in my hand.

The mower hasn’t had a cover since the last belt change. Belts fly off, and I suggested putting the cover back on so we wouldn’t have to walk the pasture looking for them. He shrugged and said he’d just have to take it off again anyway. Country logic: why secure what you’ll unscrew by lunchtime?

He keeps saying we’ll get a new mower once we get ahead – a phrase that means nothing in our operation because as soon as you fix one thing, something else decides to retire without notice.

My husband has been cutting and baling hay in a cabbed tractor with no air conditioning for the last three years. He even has the parts to fix it, somewhere in the back of his work truck. But instead of taking the time to fix the problem, he just shrugs and keeps right on baling – inside a rolling “green”house, where temperatures have reached a high of 116 degrees.

If you’re asking yourself, “Can’t he remove the doors and glass to get some air moving?” The answer is, “Absolutely, he can!” But then he risks being swarmed by bumble bees. You see, bumble bees build nests in the ground, and when you run over one in tall grass, they get real irritated. He’s had a bad experience before. Years ago, he ran over a nest in an open-cab tractor and ended up bailing off the side while it was moving. The bees chased that tractor all the way into the pond.

My country boy is tough because he never complains. I honestly don’t know how he does it. I hate being hot. And I know what you’re thinking – why don’t you start really early in the morning when it’s cooler? You can’t start until the morning dew has burned off. On the days when there is no dew, that means it’s been hot all night and it’s about to get hotter. I think his tractor sauna has warped his brain – somewhere between heatstroke and hay dust – because by dark, he’ll say, “It wasn’t that bad today.”

If you ask him why he hasn’t fixed the A/C, he’ll squint across the pasture and say something wise-sounding like, “Well, I was gonna… but then it was hay season.” As if that explains everything – and in a way, it does.

When we bought our new-ish work truck, it was really nice. A clean black mega-cab dually with a manual six-speed that had been deleted and tuned and ran like a scalded dog. But the truck has had more run-ins with deer than a game warden during rut season. The first deer collision messed up the grill. We replaced the grill and bought a chrome grill guard with a winch. That grill guard has been sitting on the garage floor for the past nine years. A few years ago, he blew a tire and took out a dually fender. The heater hasn’t worked in so long that his winter driving routine involves scraping ice off the inside of the windshield. It hasn’t seen a car wash in eight years. The side mirrors are great – they stick out far enough to keep an eye on the trailer but are broken from the last hailstorm that gave the whole truck a good beat-down. Oh, and the brakes only squeal some of the time. Last week, the A/C stopped working. The truck is a beast – and now looks like one too.

In our little slice of heaven, we have two main seasons: propane season and hay season. Propane really goes on all year; it’s just not as busy in the summer. Hay season falls somewhere in the summer, in a sweet spot that changes every year. After the rains stop, the weather has to warm up so the grass can grow. Fertilizer gets sprayed, followed by a little rain. While waiting for the hay meadows to dry and the grass to shoot up, it’s supposedly the perfect time to prepare all the mowing equipment for the season. But sometimes in Oklahoma, the weather shifts overnight and – bingo – it’s go time. Daylight’s a wastin’.

Meanwhile, some folks get antsy and bale too soon. Just the other day, we were loading last year’s hay from a location about thirty minutes from our place. I sat there, doing my job: holding my foot on the brake while the hay was loaded, and I watched in amazement as a guy across the road, in a brand-new tractor pulling a brand-new baler, made deep ruts in the mud and nearly got stuck every time he turned the corner to run over wet windrows, water pouring from his baler. An old timer driving down the road stopped to chat. He looked over to see why my expression looked so worried and said, “Reckon he’ll learn the hard way. He just moved here from California.”

When you bale wet grass, it molds on the inside and you also risk it catching fire when the temperatures rise. Bless his heart.

And finally – let’s not forget that front flower bed. As I’m typing this, my Romeo is outside with fifty bags of mulch, laying out plans. We built our home in 2016 and moved in that November. “Front flower bed” has been on his honey-do list since spring of 2017. Time is the hottest commodity here at The Cross Creek Cattle Company. So it is chosen wisely.

One thing I’ve noticed: if you’ve got a little land, you probably have nice, shiny equipment you wash before returning it to its tidy shed. But once you cross a certain acreage threshold, things start to change. Your “fleet” turns into a lineup of elderly machines held together by duct tape, faith, and the occasional bungee cord.

Every year, despite the weather being either too something – too wet, too dry, too hot, or too windy – we stumble our way through hay season, with every intention of having equipment in tip-top shape next year. I think maybe the thing that keeps us from fulfilling that dream is all the life interruptions that happen between the end of hay season and the beginning of propane season. But life always interrupts, and thank goodness it does. A life without interruptions would be boring – and might even soften a good man.

The Good Book says, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for today has enough trouble of its own.” That’s why here at the end of this dirt road, we don’t fix it till we need it.