It’s almost 9 pm, and the sun is setting over the coast range, bathing the world in pinkish-gold light. The heat of the day dispels rapidly, and I shiver in the sudden cold breeze as I bike home from work, past my neighbors’ orchards, the fields I haven’t combined yet, and my cousins’ trucking business.

I hear the long, low whistle of a train, and it chugs past as I turn onto Substation and roll into the driveway. My mom is outside watering flowers.

Another magical summer day draws to a close.

Working on the Farm

During my college days, I started working on various farms in the area to earn cash in the summer, and while I enjoyed the pleasant monotony of putzing around the field on a combine all day, I didn’t always like the baggage that came with it. Like the farmer who used his combine drivers as free babysitters, bringing one or all of his offspring out to sit in my cab, fight with each other, and demand I tell them stories. Or the farmer whose combines were forevermore plugging up, requiring me to unclog them by hand using a giant wrench that hung on the back of the machine. 

Once I graduated and no longer needed money so desperately, I thought I was done with the gig. But then a couple of years later, I started working for cousin Darrell up the road. His combine basically never plugged up, and I never had to babysit his kids, and next thing you know, I’ve been doing this for seven summers in a row. 

Magically, in all my years living hither and yon, it’s always worked for me to come back to Oregon in the summer. 

However, when I tell people about going back to Oregon and doing farm work, they always assume I’m working on my parents’ farm, and I find the truth rather hard to explain. Darrell is my dad’s first cousin, but the farm is the same one that my great-grandfather farmed, and also where he started his grass seed cleaning warehouse that eventually passed on to my dad. So in some ways, I did grow up on the farm I’m now farming, running around with my cousins, swimming in the creek, and tagging bags at the warehouse.

Growing up, I read books about farms and always imagined them having pretty defined borders. It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized:

Farmers own a lot of really random, disjointed fields. Darrell’s farm isn’t so bad, as you can draw a line all the way around it if you have to, although it makes a really weird shape. But I worked for a farmer once whose fields were miles away from each other.All the fields that surround me are part of someone’s farm.

I grew up running through the fields next to my house, and the ones close to the warehouse, and not realizing I was actually on someone’s farm. It honestly wasn’t until I worked for Darrell that it occurred to me that the “back way” I constantly used to go to my friend Stephy’s house was actually a farm access road.

Strawberry June

Every June, strawberry season arrives with gusto, and we pick buckets and gorge ourselves and it doesn’t matter because if we don’t eat them now they’ll just go bad.

Real strawberries, full of juice and flavor. Not those hard, tart, oddly dry ones they sell in the grocery stores all winter.

When I got to Oregon, my first week passed in a flurry of activity, and suddenly I realized that strawberry season was early this year, and I’d just missed it.

Crushing.

I should note that these last few years I’ve only worked three days a week in the harvest, using the other week days to keep up on my writing tasks, see friends, and do my laundry. 

The following Tuesday, I went to the river with all the women are used to hang out with back in the day and their young children. “Who wants strawberries and cream?” called Heather, who is married to my childhood friend Preston. 

Then she pulled out mason jar after mason jar of fresh sliced strawberries.

I’d heard that Preston and Heather were going to start a strawberry patch, which I was really excited about as it would be by far the closest strawberry patch to my parents’ house. But they just put in the plants this year and I thought they weren’t going to be open until next year.

“Do you have strawberries?” I asked incredulously. “Like, could I come pick some?”

“Yes!” said Heather. It turned out that they didn’t advertise opening this year because they didn’t know how many strawberries they would get, but then the strawberries arrived in abundance a week or two after the main strawberry season was over.

They literally live like, a two or three-minute drive away. Mom and I hopped over there before work the next morning and picked buckets in the chill air while Preston and Heather’s children wandered around the fields picking and eating berries as they pleased, living the magical childhood that everyone dreams of.

Fun Jaunts with Friends

Maybe some day in the future I’ll get to the point where I can spend my summers focused on friendship and working in the harvest and leave my writing for the rest of the year. As it is, it’s a bit difficult sometimes to focus on fun times with friends while working two jobs.

Still, I’ve managed to make it work, mostly because my health has been pretty good.

Of course, when your friends are grown with children a fun jaunt might be something like going and helping them plant their corn. But it might also be going up to Lincoln city to watch a kite festival on the beach.

Turning 35

I turned 35 yesterday. My friends and I went out to the coast after church and had a picnic lunch. The weather was wonderful although it was windy and a layer of sand accumulated on everything, food included. 

When I was young, I had some idea that growing older was a generally unpleasant experience. I’m not sure where this came from. Maybe it’s a lie I told myself to get through the terrible trial of enduring adolescence. Who knows.

As far as I can tell, being young has only one true advantage over being older, and that is the physical health aspect. People my age start to feel tired a lot and miss that boundless energy of their youth. But this is nothing to me, as I was far more tired in my youth than I am now.

But there is one truly terrible thing about getting older that I never thought about when I was a teen, even though, in hindsight, adults talked about it all the time.

That is the absolute panic I feel at how quickly time moves.

It really started ramping up in my 30s. Suddenly, I was the same age that I remember my parents being, and my peers had kids that were the age I clearly remember being. The fashions of my youth were in vogue again. The world had changed so much I felt despair that no one would ever again experience that type of childhood that I did. 

As a kid, it felt like I was living in a singular point in time, whereas now I feel like I am existing in the long arc of history, which is actually much shorter than I ever imagined.

I find it inherently upsetting and unsettling, and it gives me that existential crisis feeling, but I’m not exactly sure why. 

The Bucket List

A year and a half ago, when I was alone in Houston over Christmas, I made a bucket list of interesting things to do to get me through that time. I ended up completing the whole list and it really was a rather magical adventure.

Eager to re-create the experience, this last year I made a list of 34 things to do while I’m 34.

I started with a lot of energy, knocking things off the list one by one. I swam in a lake. I went to the chiropractor. I visited enchanted Forest.

Then I started making plans to take a trip to New York City.

This was a pretty weird year for me all together. I stayed in Oregon until the beginning of October, then went back to Houston for two weeks, then took a complicated and convoluted trip back east that included stops in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York City, smooshing together a work trip and a friend’s wedding into one travel event. 

It was all rather last minute and convoluted. I ended up calling an old friend and randomly asking if she wanted to go to New York City with me, and she couldn’t make it, but I realized after we hung up that I’d fulfilled  a bucket list item to call someone I hadn’t spoken to in 5+ years. In the end it all worked out, as she had a friend in New York City that I sort of knew through the Internet, and I was able to arrange to stay with her.

Shout out to Alyssa!

As haphazard as the trip was, it ended up being phenomenal and one of the highlights of my year.

Then, a week after I returned from that trip, I moved up to Chattanooga at the beginning of November.

Once I was moved, my priorities changed. I wasn’t so concerned with doing fun unique things that were on my bucket list. Instead, I was much more focused on making friends and integrating myself into the community.

So that’s when I put the bucket list aside and didn’t really think about it much for the rest of the year.

Revisiting it now, I have one great regret.

You see, when I was in Iceland and went to the public pool, I had a hankering to go down the waterslide. Of course, it was only kids on the waterslide, but there was no rule against adults using it, so I climbed up the steps, stood at the top, looked into the dark yawning hole of the waterslide, and suddenly remembered how much I detest the feeling of falling.

I’d done a log flume ride at Enchanted Forest, and the memory of that final terrible plunge still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

So then, embarrassingly, I walked back down the stairs past all the eager 10-year-olds who were going the opposite direction.

I never really regretted that choice until I took a look at my bucket list the other night and realized “go down the waterslide“ was on it. I’d completely forgotten I put that there.

So in the end, I only completed 10 of the 34 things. I still have a hankering to do the others, and I suppose I’ll get to them someday.

But in general, I think I need to have a more limited scope for my bucket lists. Pick a time when I’m typically having a hard time, like February and March, and use the bucket list to spice my life up a bit.

You know, looking back at it now, between moving to Chattanooga, going to New York City, and going to Iceland, I have to say 34 was one of the best years of my life.

Cheers to 35!