I always knew I wanted a big family, so it didn’t surprise me when Steve and I decided to have five children. Moving away from Chicago to a warmer climate was something Steve had fantasized about since we got married, so moving wasn’t that big of a deal. Deciding to chuck it all and move to the country was always on my radar to some degree, so no surprises there.
But there are just some things that I could never have imagined. In my wildest dreams I never saw myself as getting giddy about horseshit. Honestly, who gets all a twitter about manure? Organic Farmers do, that’s who. No shit (pun intended), finding a source for the mac daddy of all fertilizer’s, horse manure, is like striking gold, so when Steve mentioned that he played a tennis match with a guy who owns horses I pounced on him. Did you get his phone number? How far away is his horse farm? Did you tell him we would love to have some of his earthy magic? I was asking the questions so fast that Steve could barely get the answers out before I asked another one.
We drove out to Sandy’s farm last week to drop off our tractor’s trailer. Pulling up to his 150 acres of pristine horse country, I couldn’t help but get goose bumps; not because of the bucolic views, but because there was literally horseshit piled EVERYWHERE! And I don’t mean yesterday’s crap I mean the finely aged, primo shit that can be worked into the planting soil immediately, no waiting time for it to be ready to spread! I was intoxicated by the mere thought that some of this was going to be ours! As I stepped out of the truck and directly onto a massive pile of pungent delight, I smiled broadly at Steve. Good find my dear man, good find.
We received the call yesterday that Sandy had filled the trailer so it was ready for pick up. I rushed through feeding the chickens and watering the greenhouse. You could have put a stopwatch to the time it took for me to make breakfast, it was that fast. I couldn’t wait to head out to retrieve our bounty.
So as we pulled onto the rural highway late this morning with a trailer bed loaded with perfectly aged horse crap, covered with a not quite big enough blue tarp, I was in redneck heaven. I can honestly say that up until right then I could have never imagined me bouncing along a highway at a speed much below the posted limit, towing horse manure under a flapping ill-fitting nasty blue tarp, catching a glimpse through the rearview mirror as small, uncovered pieces of poop bounced off onto the hoods of cars behind us, forcing them to swing out to pass us when space allowed, glaring at us with disdain as they did. No, I am certain I have never imagined anything quite so awesome.