Helping Hands

There are days when what I do for a living can only sound dignified, can only sound justified, if gentrified with some fancy-schmancy code talk like "hands on" or "one on one", boutique language for old fashioned pick 'em up and set  'em down grunt work. The kind of work Henry Ford conceived assembly lines for.  The kind of work "our fathers brought forth on this continent" back when Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address.  The same kind of work family members on both sides did with their backs, and their arms, their calloused hands with broken knuckles, their sun reddened necks and their sun squinted eyes.  My house has indoor plumbing, climate control, and electronic comforts they couldn't conceive of, but if we met at table over the noon meal, we would be comrades, understanding both the pressure of the calendar, the urgency of daylight, and the limitations imposed by two arms and two legs.

So....there are nights when I ponder my age as I finish my devotions, and the impending, if not ongoing, decline in strength, stamina, and, most terrifying, memory.  And I watch my energetic and intelligent children work like there is no tomorrow in a business full of risks both natural and man made; I cannot guarantee their futures, their success, with my efforts or prayers.  Hard work flattens the uphill battle, but can never make the path smooth.

But every spring, hope does leap for joy as the earth awakens...again.  And to the cycle of the seasons, we add our own age old tale of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, families following the footsteps of those before, learning by example how to get up, gather your tools, start your task, organize your day, pay attention to your surroundings, and work together.  Designing a bridge; writing an editorial; researching a cure; stringing wire; welding; driving cross country; teaching twelve year olds; counseling; protecting our nation; these tasks do not allow you to 'bring your kid to work'. But my job does.  And therein lies much of the joy of this hand-to-plant, hose-to-water, soil-to-pot, work.

If you ask most farmers, they have stories to tell about working with their parents, their grandparents.  I learned to work from my folks: it didn't come natural...and we considered teaching our kids to work part of our calling as parents.  Our peculiar advantage as self employed farmers and small businessmen was the ability to lead by example; our intense pleasure was that of working alongside our children and watching them grow in maturity and responsibility until there was no need to check their work.Their word was their bond.

Now it's their turn to meld parenthood and vocation, to balance ability with responsibility and channel youthful enthusiasm into constructive accomplishment.  Little hands put tags on baskets, or take a turn writing labels for seed trays, or plant cages around baby tomatoes.  Learning to water is not as easy as it looks! Working with dad and mom at menial tasks means the word 'menial' won't be part of their vocabulary; no task is 'make work' when every minute is valuable.

All work, no play makes Jack a dull boy, but a greenhouse is a fine place for imagination to run wild, like a jungle gym or battlefield, for sidewalk art or kickball, for building forts and smokehouses, castles and kitchens. There is plenty of time for kids to be kids with nary a screen in sight.

Because business and pleasure travel hand in hand if you work with your family.  Decisions are made with one eye on the bottom line and the other........ on where the two year old might have run off to.

Great minds thinking together..

Micro Management....or Taking Care of Business

You get up every morning
From your alarm clock's warning
Take the 8:15 into the city
There's a whistle up above
And people pushin', people shovin'
And the girls who try to look pretty

And if your train's on time
You can get to work by nine
And start your slaving job to get your pay
If you ever get annoyed
Look at me I'm self-employed
I love to work at nothing all day..Randy Bachman

And there's nothing cold as ashes after the fire is gone....Faron Young

I would say I could hardly face the headlines this morning, but that would be hedging.   I simply didn't read the news this morning.  I didn't scroll through the Wall Street Journal opinion page and I haven't turned on Fox News.  I have yet to forgive my favorite pundits their rosy scenarios, even if they sincerely believed they were right.   Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn's close nearly clashing harmony comes to mind in Faron Young's classic cheatin' song:

Though the steam rolled off the coffeemaker, the morning was truly cold as ashes.

"How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws and kings can cause or cure."...Samuel Johnson

That quote was ever on our minds thirty years ago, but it seems to have fallen from favor.  Even as the media, blogosphere, and even Williams Sonoma entreats us to get closer to our plates by gathering honey from our own hives, chasing our own chickens around the yard, and washing soil and its associated wildlife from our own greens, our society either pounds its collective fists on the table of public opinion and yells, "MORE!" , or else sits in the middle of the sidewalk like a two year old at the zoo and says it can't go on.

Ha!  That felt good.   Not constructive, but cathartic.

So....rather than moping around in my flannel jammies and shuffling listlessly through the day,  I took full stock of what could be accomplished, election or no election.  It is a long list, believe it or not.  I like to think Randy Bachman was more focused on selling a catchy tune and making the big bucks than in creating a paean to the huddled workers of the world but if the driving beat doesn't get you out the door, the needling notion that self employment lets you 'work at nothing all day' gets under your skin.  Karl Marx said 'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. ', meaning a relief from pain.  Experience has led me to the conclusion that work is a perfectly good antidote to disappointment, pushing aside that which cannot be cured for that which can.

In economic parlance, we turn our attention to the micro part of our lives rather than the macro.  Rather than mourning for that which we never did control and over which we could only exert the most miniscule and incremental of influences, we should turn our energies, passions, hands and hearts to that which we can.  Amen.  Long live our micro habitat, our milieu, our domain, our territory.  We are not the aggregate; we cannot budge the GNP, nor make the Iranians play nice.  But rather than 'rage at the dying of the light', we  do our part and :

Put on a Happy Face....

No more 'Blues in the Night'.  No more 'the sun will come out tomorrow'. No more 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'.  

I'll be... 

Taking care of business, every day

Taking care of business, every way

I've been taking care of business, it's all mine

Taking care of business. and working overtime

Work out

Hard Labor

Monday afternoon I was threading my needle and preparing to sew candy canes onto Abbie's costume for the preschool Christmas program when she pulled herself up next to me on a tall stool and asked, 'Grandma, can I help?'  One of the blessings of grandparent-hood is the ability to say, 'sure, I wish you would!'  Unfortunately, with a sharp needle as a tool and an index finger already bleeding, I was forced to decline Abbie's generous offer and received a crestfallen countenance in response.  I hated to break her helpful 4 year old heart, but was buoyed yet again by her willing spirit.  For any parent, or grandparent, or teacher, or any other adult, rejoices to hear the request: 'Can I help?'  

There is a magic moment in a child's life when he knows he is no longer a baby and believes he is equal in many respects to mommy and daddy. ( This belief is apparent during daylight hours, but disappears inconveniently after 10 o'clock at night.)  Kids don't mind making their beds, will put their dishes in the sink, might attempt to put their clothes away, and even go through the motions of picking up toys.  I can remember this stage, because my vision of a clean room was so diametrically opposed to that of my father.  Unfortunately, this stage doesn't last.  All parents know there is an inverse relationship between a child's age and his willingness to be a useful contributor to the household and society past some critical point, probably not long after first grade.  Not surprisingly, this may also coincide with the Biblical age of accountability 


(Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Genesis 3:17). Toil is one of those words that sounds ugly, invoking sludge, mud, repetition , brain numbing, Sisyphean and even pointless labor.  It contrasts, at least to me, with the word 'work', which implies movement to a goal, an accomplishment, something of value and worth.  The good news is that most children do not recognize the nuanced differences between the words, 'toil' and 'work'.  The bad news is that, the older they get, they most certainly realize that 'toil' is not only hard, but also the only kind of work they are given.


This long muse is a result of powers way above the level of parental intervention.  The United States government wishes to take the burden of taskmaster off the shoulders of moms, dads, grandmas and grandpas as far as farm work is concerned.  No more of that nasty toil, dirt, grime, heat, cold, and other character building adjectives.  Nothing should be too hard for 'the children'.




I could regale you with tales from my childhood.  My father was in charge of hard, hard work and my sister and I kept our feelings to ourselves whenever he called us out and assigned us our chores.   I learned  to complete a task and maintain a stoic, if not cheerful, expression at the same age I learned the meaning of the word. Even while working on our own, we assumed our parents were omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, just like the Trinity, as far as work was concerned.  Unlike cleaning our room, we took our farm work quite seriously.  I do not remember ever attempting to 'slide by' on any assignment my parents gave me, though their memories may differ.  

In many cases, working FOR our parents meant working WITH our parents.  That's how Blake grew up and that has been the experience for all three of our children.  It is difficult to feel picked on or punished when working alongside your father, grandfather, mother or grandmother.  Our greenhouse business has been the incubator for more than one work ethic.  When we first began building, there would be a kid on one end of the string making the straight line for posts.  There would be a kid fetching tools.  Or a kid holding the ladder.  Early on, covering a greenhouse was a family affair....even the youngest was heavy enough to sit on a corner of plastic and keep the wind from getting underneath.  Everyone took turns filling pots with potting mix; everyone was expected to help carry pots and flats.  The cardinal rule was: no bathroom break, no coffee break, no lunch break, until your plants or seeds are watered in.  Not all work is life or death, but some is.

When kids work, its not just about productivity or the bottom line.  One of Grandpa H.'s favorite aphorisms still holds true:'A boy is a boy; two boys is half a boy, and three boys is no boy at all!'  No, kids work for a host of reasons, very few pecuniary.  Moms and dads "take a kid to work" to keep them out of trouble; to teach by example; and, to spend time together.  The hardworking dad at our place confessed more than once that he recruited his kids' help because he liked the company, not just because they were "good help".

On weekend mornings in the spring, its hard to keep track of all the kids at the greenhouse.  Aaron is old enough now to be commandeered by his daddy to help feed pots or trays into the dirt machine, or help at the transplanter,   He's eight; he's spent parts of every spring of his life in these structures, crawling through the potting mix, untagging tagged flats, watering constructively and destructively moment to moment.  When his kindergarten class came to visit,  Aaron was the proud in-house expert.  I am proud of his knowledge and of his parents for starting him out right.  The younger kids will be almost five: too young to really work, but they will still push buttons on and off, help tag sporadically, push carts along the sidewalk, and plant the occasional flat of petunias or impatiens.  What they will mostly do, and quite responsibly, is take care of themselves and each other.  They'll amuse themselves, secure in the knowledge that they are on home turf and mom, dad, uncle, aunt, cousins, and grandparents are all within shouting distance.  

A farm, or a greenhouse, admittedly, can be a dangerous place.  So is the rest of the world.  But whatever rules and regs are imposed upon small businesses and family farms will not make them safer than the schools, playgrounds, shopping centers and parking lots kids frequent.  All work and no play may make Jack a dull boy, the nursery rhyme says, but the lesson our kids learned early and often was to never let on, or speak the fateful words: 'I'm bored!'  Working with adults builds ties that bind closer than gifts or treats.  The kids "own" their accomplishments; they know what Dad and Mom do for a living, and have a sense of how difficult it can be. If you spend your weekend holding sheetrock on your head, or straddling the metal framework of the  endwall of a greenhouse 16' feet in the air,  or watering the same 3000' sq.ft. of tomatoes that you watered the day before, you truly appreciate Sunday afternoon off.  And you will also know, for a fact, that you have accomplished something tangible.  These are lessons taught by life, by moms and dads who seem heartless and tone deaf, to kids who will suffer these torments, silently or no.  These same tales of hard work and "hardship" will pass into family legend, to be resurrected for the edification and example of the next generation of kids drug away from the cartoons to hold the tape measure or fetch the socket set.  

 Why do kids work with their folks?  


'What's bred in the bone...'