Whenever we get away for a bit, there is much planning to be done. Just recently we had the chance to leave the farm for a day, twice, within a couple of weeks. Unusual!
Even if it’s only one day away, the cows still have to be milked, and the heifers and calves still need tending. For the most part, they don’t care who does it, just as long as it gets handled. All the bases must be covered in our absence or the work has to be done before we take off.
Mid-May, our daughter was done with her first year at college; amazing in and of itself. One whole year under her belt already! She had asked us a while back if we’d be willing to drive to La Crosse to help her cart her stuff home, as she had accumulated a variety of necessities during this first year away. You might know.
Of course we agreed, and I wrote it on my calendar in big, bright colors. The day arrived and we got done milking, feeding and scraping up in record time, leaving the farm at 7:30 a.m. for the over three-hour drive to the La Crosse campus. For probably the first time ever, we did not run into any trouble before taking off.
Whenever we plan a getaway, inevitably a cow decides to calve, two weeks early or two weeks late, and then has a traumatic time of it. The heifers bust loose and the fence must be fixed before we leave, or a crucial piece of machinery bites the dust at this most inopportune time. None of that happened! We were on the road right on time.
Grabbing breakfast on the way, we pulled into campus and parked our car amidst the clamor and chaos. Many vehicles were being stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey, beyond capacity, as parents were helping their children pack up to go home. Our daughter’s dorm happened to be on the fourth floor (with no elevator!) so we made numerous trips up and down, up and down, securing everything in her vehicle and ours, making sure neither had an obstruction of view for driving safely back, another three-plus hours home.
That day we made it there and back by 4 p.m., just in time to head out to the barn for night chores. That little getaway tuckered us out more than anything, but it was so worth it to have our girl back home for the summer.
A week later, my husband casually mentioned we should take in our son’s baseball game. Not only does our middle one come home occasionally to play BABA ball on the weekends up here, he also plays on a team in Milwaukee, at a facility called The Rock Sports Complex near Greenville. It’s a beautiful venue that has six ball fields that are replica models of major league parks. Very impressive.
I like to surprise this kid of ours, and in the process, occasionally making his jaw drop, a sizable feat. Checking with his best friend’s fiancee, I had asked her for directions to the sporting complex the boys play at. The game was scheduled for 7 p.m. on a Thursday night. We had not started haying and we were done planting, so the timing could not have worked out any better.
As soon as my husband had uttered the words: “We should go watch him play once” I got on my phone, secured our milker and asked my daughter if she and her friend would like to go along for the ride. They ended up driving us down to Milwaukee and back!
Getting there just as our son was stretching, we walked up behind him and through the fence my husband muttered: “Hey, Reminger! Make something happen!” Our son turned to see his mom and dad, sister and friend standing there and he was speechless. (For anyone that knows our kid, they understand “speechless” is definitely not a term to describe him!)
Later on, he laughingly wondered to a friend, “Who was holding down the farm while they were over here on a Thursday night?”
We ended up having a wonderful evening, watching his team win. This kid is a player through and through who loves and respects the game of baseball. It’s a thrill for us to watch him play ball.
So that little day getaway got us off milking for one night, and on the road again for a little over six hours total. The next day, as the day after we had brought our daughter home from La Crosse, we were pretty wiped out. But to have our girl home for the summer, and to have shocked our normally talkative middle son into a speechless surprise was all very much worth the planning for a couple of day trips off the farm.
(“Put God in charge of your work, then what you’ve planned will take place.” Proverbs 16:3, The Message Bible)
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