Blue Shadows Farm: A Novel

62. Longtime Relationship—1986

359 1986 Emma tried to ignore the Professor Golightlys of the world, the bankers and loan agencies that encouraged borrowing to buy more land and equipment, the university extension specialists who proclaimed the need for farmers to get big or get out, and the factory farmers who were held up as models for the future. But it was difficult . In her own neighborhood, where once within a few miles she could count a dozen small farms, today there were but three, her own included. She missed the threshing, silo filling, and corn shredding crews that came by each summer and fall—neighbors helping each other with the harvest. Neighbors who knew each other, enjoyed each other’s company (with exception, of course), and depended on each other to help harvest their crops. The neighbors were gone, and the neighborhood as she remembered it had disappeared . True, some of the old-timers had never forgiven her father and mother for what they had done and, in turn, had been reluctant to help her. But most of these people had died or moved away, and those who had remained had been good neighbors to Jim and her. Now she hired a custom operator to combine the twenty acres of 62 Longtime Relationship oats that Jim and she planted each year. She hired a man with a corn picker to harvest their twenty-acre corn crop. She bought a secondhand forage harvester, which Jim used to cut corn for silo filling. Emma increased the size of their dairy herd to forty milk cows, which was the capacity of her dairy barn, and she purchased a bulk cooling tank to replace the ten-gallon milk cans they had used for years. The Link Lake Cheese Factory manager had encouraged her to build an addition to the barn and buy more cows, but she refused. “Forty cows are about all that Jim and I can handle,” she told him. “If I added more cows, I’d have to hire more help, and I don’t want to do that.” She noticed the changes not only in rural Link Lake and Ames County—with abandoned farms, absentee owners, and a few large farms remaining—but in town as well. The gristmill had closed in the 1970s—it had become a gift shop that attracted many visitors because of its picturesque location on the banks of the millpond near the old dam. The mercantile had been transformed into an antique store. The once prosperous hardware store housed a craft shop; Link Lake Seed and Feed had been abandoned, the building slowly falling down. And what had been Gorman’s Harness Shop was now headquarters for the Link Lake Historical Society. In the early 1980s, land prices fell, and Emma was pleased that she had not bought more land like her Reinert cousins had. Farmers had gone bankrupt all over Ames County, with the banks taking over the land and holding auctions. Just like during the Depression. The Reinerts lost most of their land—they had but 160 acres left when the bank got through with them. Emma’s farm had been 160 acres from the time her grandfather Silas Starkweather had homesteaded the place, and she meant to keep it that size. People in the Link Lake community had developed a new respect for Emma and her hired man, Jim. They had survived the early 1980s with few problems, mostly because their land had been paid for and they had few debts. 360 Longtime Relationship—1986 361 Longtime Relationship—1986 By 1986, when Emma was sixty and Jim seventy, the farm was making enough money so they could live comfortably and not worry about financial problems. Jim had slowed down considerably in the last couple years, and Emma, too, appreciated taking a little more time to enjoy her garden, walk in the lupines each spring, and watch the sunsets. Emma and Jim had developed a great respect for each other. They clearly loved each other, but not in an intimate, physical sense, although Emma would have enjoyed sharing her bed with Jim. They never talked about it, but when Emma first hired Jim, they desperately needed each other. That need, at several levels, continued over the years—indeed continued to 1986. As the years passed they had become a great team. They kept Blue Shadows Farm going through thick and thin, and they had...