My day started with the frantic ringing of the doorbell followed by heavy pounding on the front door. I’d heard something like thunder earlier that had set the dogs into a frenzy, but when I looked outside to see the retina scarring bright sky, with no smell of wildfire smoke in the air, I decided it must have been a sonic boom and I put myself back to bed.
I work nights. This means I clock in at 7pm and make a mad dash for the door at 7:30am. I’m an ER nurse. We do math. We do very important math. At 6:55am, I need to know the difference between a 1:1,000 and 1:10,000 strength dose of meds and know whether to push 0.4mL per kg or 0.04 mL per kg. Lives literally depend on it. An over tired caregiver, on her 23rd hour of wakefulness, makes mistakes. So I stay up late the night before I work — and I sleep in as late as I can the day I cover a night shift.
But not today. Nope. Someone was pounding on my door at 7:42am and thinking there must have been some sort of terrible emergency – or a UPS wine delivery (my driver knows to wake me up for those signatures!), I answered the door. A hot air balloon had landed behind our gated, “No Trespassing” fence and there was a walkie-talkie dude standing in front of me wanting to know how to get through the fence to retrieve the hot air balloon and passengers.
That was the loud noise I’d heard. It was the operator pumping more gas into the flame to keep the balloon afloat — only to land in an unkempt pasture of juniper trees, sagebrush and very dry wild grasses with no water access. What could possibly go wrong landing a giant fireball on dry land surrounded by kindling in the midst of high 90 degree temp days?
Everything.
About once every 2-3 years, a neighbor has set something ablaze that has resulted in a 911 call to the local fire department. We’ve kept the fires away from our house but a few of those times, it’s been pure luck or answered prayers when the wind miraculously switched directions and spared us.
I unwillingly traded in my last 6 hours of sleep for a post-balloon landing fire watch. We are custodians of 160 acres, crops, farm animals and wildlife. We don’t get to pick the days, or time of the day, that we are responsible for what happens on the farm. Things happen and we rise to the occasion, grit our teeth, and deal with it. That’s farm ownership.
It was about this moment I looked out to find the new, oversized kiddie pool in a lump. Walking out to assess the pool, I nearly rolled my ankle in a mole hole. Didn’t I just fill in all of the mole holes? Dang. It was fresh. Rodents.
The lawn was covered in brown colored dry spots. Water skips? Nope. Mushrooms wouldn’t be growing without water. Insects. More specifically, grubs and grub kill.
I passed the new cherry tree and hesitated momentarily to take a closer look. What the …? More insects. Nearly every leaf was riveted with multiple holes.
I gazed across the garden. A few days earlier, my newly planted sprouts were taken down to mere stems by the local bunny population. All of them. I had replanted veggies I’d picked up at local nurseries the day earlier and had attempted to spray them with deer and rabbit repellent the night before, but the liquid was too thick for the sprayer and the only thing that got inundated with the vomit-decomp smelling fluid was my hands. It had been 12-15 hours and the smell still lingered on both hands. If it’s bad enough to gag an ER nurse, you know it’s really disgusting.
It was.
I found the hole in the pool and repaired it. I sprayed the cherry tree with fruit tree and environmentalist approved insecticide. I put the deer/rabbit repellent into a watering can and watered my tender garden transplants – gagging along the way. I put a hit out on the mole, filled in all but 1 hole and reseeded the bare spots. I sifted grub killer through gloved fingers over the lawn’s dead spots. I watered. I got the pool filter set up and functioning. And I got it all done with just enough time left over to hop in the shower and get myself to work on time.
I passed my husband on the way out the door and told him that the farm was trying to kill me, it was time to sell and buy a condo that came with a maintenance crew. He laughed.
I’ve been awake just over 26 hours now, I had coworkers double check my math before dosing patients so nobody died and I returned home to garden boxes full of plants and an inflated pool. I’ll be asleep as soon as the eggs are collected from the chickens (or they eat them) and the cheat grass sticker is removed from the dog’s ear.
It’s already a better day than yesterday – or was that today?
The Girl In Muddy Boots 