The women weren’t actually named Florence and Jane (despite what I wrote in the last post). I don’t remember their actual names. They told me but I forgot within seconds. Ignoring names is a special skill of mine.
I’ve arbitrarily decided to call these two nice ladies Florence and Jane. Who gives a shit about actual names? Would a rose by any other name be less likely to drive a truck across my field?
What’s important is they were very pleasant people. I wanted them to stay and talk. I simply had to hear their story.
The first thing I learned was that Florence and Jane had been hired by the farmer who “rents” some of my land.
Full disclosure, I own some land and I rent out a piece of it. Don’t be impressed. It’s shitty land; which is all I could afford. Then again, it’s mine and therefore better than land which is not mine. (I were rich I’d buy more of the shitty land around me. Like most men I don’t want to own all the land but I do want to own all land that touches mine.) Back to the point, some of my shitty land is (barely) suitable for agriculture so I rent it to a farmer who plants and harvests the fields. By rent I mean I pretend he’s going to pay me and he pretends he will get around to doing it. In reality no money changes hands and we both know it. Instead I accept the sorry truth that his tractor runs and mine doesn’t. It’s worthwhile to let him plant crops on my small shitty field in exchange for having a properly maintained small shitty field instead of an improperly maintained small shitty mess of weeds.
The second thing I figured out was that they were there to kill gophers. My fields have gophers. Don’t act surprised; if you’ve got a field you’ve got gophers too (unless you’ve got some other creature mucking up the land; like prairie dogs, woodchucks, or hippies).
Gophers do what God programmed into their dense little heads and they spend their days making piles of dirt. The piles wreak havoc upon the farmer’s decrepit equipment (which is much better than my imaginary equipment). Thus, he “hired” Florence and Jane to do some good old-fashioned gopher killing.
I was in the presence of genuine agricultural hired killers!
Can there be a better world than one where professional gopher killing rednecks scratch out a living with a rusted F150 and a bunch of traps? I wanted to give them both a hug!
This is why I love living in the country! Sure, cities have the opera and decent Chinese food, but I’ve got friendly hired agricultural killers with which to associate. I’ve been to the opera, it was OK but it pales in comparison to sitting on a tailgate discussing the honorable art of rodent killin’.
Florence and Jane, for their part, had no clue the land didn’t belong to the farmer. I immediately declared “no harm, no foul”. They had a good reason to be there and the dreaded “survey stakes” were to locate and secure gopher killing apparatus (as opposed to something nightmarish like a rogue real estate developer). There was also the mention of a bounty on gophers. I dimly understood that an obscure branch of the local government pays a certain amount per dead gopher! This was news to me. By then I’d warmed to them. I offered them coffee.
One was more business-like but the other spoke my language. “I’d love coffee! Jane didn’t let me stop for a cup this morning and I’m going to die!”