The Constant Farmer
Farmers are hard workers. The share similarities with our kind. We plough a singular furrow through life, unwavering and determined. Their lives are full yet they never really have time or opportunity to connect fully with other people because they have so many demands. They till the field and broadcast the seed, tending to the various crops as they watch and wait allowing the barley or corn, the potatoes or beet to grow to the optimum position before moving quickly to harvest them whilst the sun shines and they can garner the very best from their endeavours. Once a particular harvest has been safely gathered in, they once would burn the stubble and what had been built up was now cut down and razed to the ground so that it returned to the earth. Animals need to be fed, mucked out, treated for disease and tended to when they give birth to new offspring. Buildings must be maintained, fences repaired, the weather watched and produce sold. Cows have to be milked, sheep shorn and pigs sold to bring home the bacon. Lambing time is a repeated battle to ensure the lambs are safely delivered with the farmer rising through the night to assist a particular ewe who may be struggling with her birth. Having helped bring forth the lamb, from the ewe being tupped, to giving birth, the lamb is then sent for slaughter. Again, that which he has built must be destroyed. It is a repeated and endless cycle, much like that which we adopt.
It is the tenth day of a silent treatment. I have removed all contact with you and left you concerned, anxious and bewildered. It is the fourth silent treatment in as many months and each one becomes longer than the one before. You have yet to work and understand what this signifies and fortunately for me you are engaged in trying to work out what is wrong and trying still to contact me. Your repeated messages and telephone calls all provide me with the negative fuel as I envisage you sat there, worried and unsettled as you tap in another text message pleading with me to get in contact with you. I picture you lying awake at night, repeatedly glancing at your ‘phone in the hope that it will light up with a response from me. You wonder what I am doing during this absence and because of who you are, your thoughts are based on concern. Have I fallen ill or something worse? Have I suffered some bad news and become depressed? Have I become a recluse? Your enquiries of my friends have proven fruitless but then they would since my coterie and Lieutenants have all been briefed that you have been horrible to me and therefore they should not respond in any helpful fashion. You hit a brick wall of resistance which puzzles you all the more. The rolled-eyes as a lieutenant shakes his head and hurries away from you as you halt your approach with confusion gripping you. You wonder whether I am locked away somewhere, engulfed in grief. In fact, I am busy hoovering your predecessor who I had just subjected to a lengthy silent period. My time away from you is not spent playing video games, watching cable television or sleeping. Not at all. Just like the farmer, I am busy tending to my crops. I am contacting all my various secondary sources of fuel, giving them a blast of golden sunshine so that their attraction to me does not wane. A few drinks with one set of inner circle friends, some flirtatious text messages with some remotes strangers and drinks with an outer circle friend who is a serious candidate for promotion to an intimate partner if I should tire completely of you and your predecessor. I am sowing the seeds, repairing the fences, milking the cows and shearing the sheep. So much to do. I am also applying my endeavours to the hoover on your predecessor and this is occupying my time as I apologise to her for my period of silence. I explain that I needed to be alone, to assess where my life was leading me and I am sorry I disappeared without saying anything but it just descended on me. I realised I had to change but I wanted to make sure that this was a real, deep-seated desire, not some butterfly like passing fancy and that was why I was gone for so long. I have trotted out the speech before and it is invariably successful and I see no reason why it will not be now. This will result in your silent treatment continuing beyond the tenth day as I take your predecessor back into the fold. I will hopefully be spending the night with her tonight as she has already agreed to dinner, although I will be taking her somewhere you will not find us. I do not want you knowing about her, not yet anyway. I need to safely gather this harvest in before I can boast about how many bushels I have collected. Once she has been hoovered back in I will announce our reconciliation. You will probably learn about it when you look again at my Facebook page for signs of activity. I know you are doing this activity every day, that is why I have not blocked you but there is nothing being posted, so the silence continues. It won’t for much longer and you will learn about her and I being together again, which will of course prompt a large dose of negative fuel from you once you learn of this.
Of course at some point it will be necessary to sow the seeds of seduction with you once again. You are on the cusp of having the flame applied to what remains of your relationship as I erase you, just as fire did to those cropped crops in the past. I will too busy showing off my prize animal, grooming it and feeding it, so it grows strong and plump, the envy of all those who are observing. How does he do it? What is his secret? How does he always manage to find such a prize specimen and make it his? The awards and accolades will pile up, testimony to the excellent stock that I have acquired until it is such time to lead her to the slaughter and cast her to one side, just as I have been nurturing the growth of your crop once again, watering you and allowing hot, golden sunshine to play on you once again.
This is how it is. You may think this silence is one where I am just away from you either ill, isolated or in contemplation. I am not. I am busy with your predecessor, just like the farmer who always has something to attend to. The days roll by, the seasons come and go, but both the farmer and I have work to attend to as we grow and harvest. We are so similar. We both have crops and flocks. We both grow, nurture and develop. We both slaughter. We both harvest. We are the constant farmers.
4 thoughts on “The Constant Farmer”
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LET,
Haha no, I’m just playing around. That was too much of a gift to pass up.
I live in a rural area, I know and know of a fair few farmers, most of whom are actually really lovely.
The narciest farmer I encountered, I met outside the school gates when we first moved back here. His son was in the same year as mine and he was in the process of divorcing his second wife. I chatted to him most afternoons outside the gates, the place was full of Alpha mums, any port in a storm!
I ran into him again at a local pub a few months later. He was sat alone at a table outside and invited us to join him. We sat down and he was knocking them back, I pace myself when I don’t know people well. We were sat there for a few hours. He talked only about himself and for the most part was funny with it. He owns the farm and a horse spa for racehorses as a sideline. I got good value out of the horse spa and didn’t get tired of teasing him about it.
Long story short, we were invited back to the farm to sit in his hot tub and ‘shoot stuff’. Apparently he sits in there at night with a gun and shoots at ‘stuff’. When we politely declined, he switched to ‘We should go drinking next weekend at Soho Farmhouse.’ Why there specifically? Why not somewhere else less showy without the brand name? He then staggered to his car, a Range Rover Overfinch. I stood up and suggested he get a taxi. He said he wasn’t taking the roads but was going to drive over his fields back home several miles away. That’s exactly what he did. In his Overfinch! Jaysus! Haha! I don’t like grandiose at all. Just very occasionally it’s so over the top grandiose though it can be funny. No doubt in my mind he is an Upper Lesser A Somatic. I can say they are at least entertaining, in small doses.
On the whole though, my experience of farmers is that they are truly nice hard working people. They grit the roads for us in their tractors when it’s snowy so people in the villages can get out. They don’t have to do that but they do. I do get pushed into hedges by tractors on a semi regular basis which does drive me nuts and the Rangey on double yellows with hazards on is also a very regular occurrence in the more touristy villages round here. That really really aggravates me too haha! So let’s say I used some artistic licence and some truth on my Jack Frost monologue!
I only thought afterwards that Jack’s sponsors are testimony to his fight against global warming. Double glazing, insulation, drives down energy usage. Mind you, he probably also superglues his face to motorways on his days off. The mastermind behind Insulate Britain Muwahahaha!
Xx
Thank you, HG, for sharing the 2016 threads, I enjoyed reading them. Someone did a number of rhymes which I thought were good too (yours are always better, HG :-))
See?!
Vote empath. Set Jack free!
*Waves banner*
Haha, TS, you’ve got a real bee in your bonnet about Jack Frost, and farmers by the looks of things, too 😛
HG has really brought it home with regard to farmers and the comparison to narcissists, but I have to object to your suggestion in terms of all the damage Jack Frost can do to crops when asserting himself with his usual sense of entitlement and at times breaking the boundaries of the seasons. It’s no wonder the farmers are so focused on their crops as they battle the likes of Jack Frost. *Flag wave for the hard working farmers*
I say, keep him in the ‘sin bin’ and let him do his time as a lesson to his sometimes impertinent ways. He’s yellow carded for now, let’s see if HG red cards him in time for Christmas Day 😉