March 8, 1999

Grand Forks N.D.

Dear classmates and friends,

Last Tuesday morning when I was getting dressed for work a communion wafer fell out of my pants. Now this is not quite as weird as it sounds-- I had worn the pants to church two days earlier when Emily and I had helped set up for communion. Still, when I think of all the things that could have fallen out of my pants, a communion wafer would have to be way down the list. My first thought was that this must be a sign that we had spent way too much time in church lately.

Our church commitments in February were rather extensive. We set up for communion three times, served coffee and donuts twice, baked three funeral cakes, served one funeral lunch, worked at two Lenten dinners and took home dish towels to wash at least three times. I know we could be spending our time in worse places than church, but I’m thinking too much of a good thing is still too much. We did one other church-related job last month. To raise money for their Lutheran youth gathering trip to Seattle next summer, Emily and six of her friends took on the job of cleaning and sweeping the stands after the finals of the North Dakota state high school hockey tournament. Some of us parents helped.

We started working about 10 p.m. and finished shortly before 3 in the morning. This is a job that requires a strong stomach. Honestly, cleaning up after the pigs on the farm wasn’t half as nasty as cleaning up after humans. At least the pigs didn’t spit sunflower seeds or chewing tobacco on the floor. Five hours of emptying the slop out of discarded paper Coke cups into a pail and shoveling garbage gave me lots of time to think about those farm chores that I hated so much as a kid. Our Dad was so good at keeping us busy. Even during the slack times, he had us painting the sheds and chicken coops or pulling weeds in the tree plots.

So many farm chores – at least in those days – fell into the hot, dirty and smelly category. Take butchering, for instance. Can’t get much messier than that. By the time Mom got us up to butcher chickens she already had scalding water on the kerosene stove in the basement. Then she took us to the chicken coop where she selected her victims and snagged them by the legs with a long metal hook. My brother, David, and I would hold the birds before she cut their heads off with her old black butcher knife. One time I was crouched down holding my chickens by their feet on the ground because they were so heavy. While I squatted there helplessly one of the chickens my mother had already decapitated jumped over my shoulder spraying me with warm blood. I suppose I could have gotten up and ran, but I didn’t want to make my mother mad by letting the other chickens go.

And of course that was just the beginning of butchering. Then there was the scalding, the plucking, the washing and the gutting. My mother always liked to turn the gutting into a chicken anatomy lesson ("Here’s the heart and here’s the lungs and that’s the gizzard&ldots;") but it didn’t make the job of carrying that pail of chicken guts to the manure pile any more pleasant.

Then there was shoveling manure. My parents had a system of corrals and sheds in which they kept the cows during calving and by the time spring came, it was pretty deep in there. But even worse than shoveling after the cows was manuring the chicken coop. The smell was like pure ammonia. Also this job always seemed to be assigned on the hottest day of the year.

Then there was rock picking. My parents owned some of the rockiest land in McPherson County, especially part of a section northwest of our farm where we labored every spring. There were just so many rocks that it didn’t seem to make any difference no matter how many we hauled away. My Dad told me that a previous owner of that land had moved away and committed suicide.

But the job I most hated was hauling bales. Alfalfa bales were the heaviest and had the most stickers so I hated those the most. In the field I usually had to stack them on the flatbed wagon. That was bad enough, but then when we got home they had to be restacked around the corrals or in the hayloft. We had a metal pole barn and the ceiling of the hayloft was so low that you couldn’t stand upright in most of it. This meant we had to crawl on our hands and knees and push the bales to the back of the loft and stack them while crouching or kneeling.

There were no windows, so there was no air circulating as we crawled around in the dark pushing those heavy bales.This is my personal vision of hell. So how about you? What are your memories of your first work experience?Didn’t we all have at least one job that made us say, "I don’t care what I have to do or how long I have to go to school, I’m going to make sure I never have to do THAT again."? Email me and tell me about it: [email protected]

By the way, about that communion wafer: I talked to Tammy Job last week and she said I should take it as a positive sign of good things coming to me. "Maybe it was God’s way of giving you a little something extra when you might need it," she said. I like the idea that the wayward wafer was a little sign from heaven. It certainly fits my theory that God has a really sublime sense of humor.

With all best wishes, Paulette