Hard Rows To Hoe

Living very near to Grandpa’s farm sentenced me to a life of weeding, or so it seemed to me then.  I felt like it was a sentence that would never be commuted.  It doesn’t take a genius to weed.  It requires no extensive training.  I didn’t have to watch a youtube tutorial to know how to weed.  I was handed a hoe, pointed in the direction, and left to it.  There was no shade to mitigate the burning rays of the sun.  There were just weeds, endless weeds.  For me, the worst type of weeding was row crops.  We grew potatoes and corn in long rows.  We used a horse drawn cultivator between the rows that uprooted many of the weeds growing between the rows, but the weeds grew everywhere, not just between the rows.  When the weeds grew among the productive plants it was my job to use the hoe to remove them without damaging the good plants.  When weeding alone I would examine each row before I started, somehow thinking that if I did the easy rows first, the difficult rows would somehow magically weed themselves.  Starting on the rows with the least weeds was a temptation I could never surmount but by the time I got to the weedier rows, I invariably wished I had started with the hard rows.  It was a scenario that repeated itself often.  It just seemed easier that way to me but it never was.  I learned over time that a wiser course was to hoe the most demanding rows first so when the heat of the day had taken its toll and I was tired, the emotional lift of facing a relatively easy row made it feel as if I was weeding downhill.  But ultimately, knowing that I had to weed every row regardless of how many weeds it contained taught me that while some rows are harder to weed and take more time to complete, they would still get weeded if I just kept weeding.  Sometimes I weeded with other people and when that happened you didn’t get to pick the easiest rows.  You just worked next the next row in line.  Some people had rows with lots of weeds and some with very few.  It was easy to think it unfair if I got a heavily weeded row or several of the worst rows.  That’s how I learned not to view the row as my fate, whether easy or hard.  It wasn’t my job to weed just the row, it was to weed the entire field.   So despite what my particular row looked like, even if it was loaded with weeds and would take far more time to weed than another, I could still do it if I just kept weeding.  When weeding with someone else, I found it best not to compare my row with theirs.   Certainly, I have found life to be no different.