Re-Countrified

On Saturday night, I went to the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg. I've gone every year for five years or so now. It's rather a tradition, and is the perfect way to spend a cold winter's evening--set foot into the Farm Show, and you get to taste a little bit of summer time in January.

The Farm Show is full of all my favorite things: big, green combines, prize-winning Black Cayuga ducks, good-lookin' guys in Carharts and cowboy hats, little girls beaming over their seventh-place Junior Market Lamb Crossbred ribbon, clipped-and-fluffed heifers ready for show... Not to mention a display or vendor for every horticultural masterpiece and hand-shaped cowboy hat known to man. Companies selling elk and emu meat, pink cowboy boots, and hand-made brooms were there. So was the PA Game Commission to tell you it is legal to hunt groundhogs 313 days per year. The annual butter statue was carved into the shape of an old fashioned milk truck. Competetors were blow-drying their heifers and clipping their rabbits' claws. The high-school rodeo kids were roping plastic steer heads shoved into bales of hay.

Heaven? I think so.

I'm about done with this city thing. Don't get me wrong--Lincoln's great as cities go. But I've no one to go to Tractor Supply Company with. I haven't yet met a Unionite who is willing to talk dairy cattle with me. No one I know really cares that the PRCA regional rodeo finals are in Omaha later on this month. I, on the other hand, am dying to spend a little time in TSC, which is just across town. (Last year I did the entirety of my Christmas shopping there, and this school year I haven't set foot in one!) I'd love (more so than is quite reasonable) to pick someone's brain on bovine lactation or calf nutrition studies. And worst of all, the First Frontier rodeo circuit finals, which I haven't missed in years and are the highlight of my winter, are at the Farm Show on Saturday night, and I can't be there. The ones in Omaha would be a nice second, but what's a solitary country girl without a car to do? And my favorite cowboy won't be there anyway--he'll be riding in Harrisburg, PA, on Saturday night...

What scares me is that I hadn't particularly noticed these losses until I stepped into the farm show complex last Saturday night. The saying, "You can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl," is utterly true. But spending all my time so far from my farm-folk friends, surrounded by traffic and buildings and scholars, is slowly burying my inner cowgirl. My Carhart is collecting dust. I can't remember the last time I lassoed anything. My cowboy hats are out of use. I haven't ridden a horse since August or fed a calf in a couple of years.

I miss my horse, my calf, my duck, and my countrier friends, as well as riding and roping and even mucking stalls and tagging calves' ears. That makes me sad.

(There's your post, Kim. Miss you guys, more than you know. Here's something for you: Canada jokes!)