We're Farmers, Not Rednecks

      I like to think that even though we live in the middle of nowhere where barnyard animals roam freely and Walmart and Rural King are upscale shopping experiences, that we're still classy people.  I mean, we may be farmers but we clean up pretty good, we're not hicks right?

At least that's what I tell myself.




    When we first moved out here, I was surprised at just how...rural...our "neighborhood" was.  Even to two people that grew up in the country, everything seemed a little more backwood-sy than we expected.  It wasn't just that our service people like the mailman and the trash collector only came when they felt like it or that even GPS can't find our house.  We were bothered by our neighbors' flocks of free-ranging ducks that liked to take up a mess-making residence in our driveway.  We really wondered about the people down the road who had a goat that was regularly grazing freely in their front yard and that occasionally was led around the yard on a leash like a puppy.  And then there's the other neighbor's collection of rustic antique tractors that seems to grow daily.  I can't say we really even noticed the random gunshots that went off at all hours of the day and night; we just spent four years in the city so that was normal to us.

   But now we're the ones with the poultry overtaking the the neighborhood, the goats running wild, and the growing assortment of farm machinery.

    But we're just farmers, we're not rednecks like our neighbors.

    We don't regularly explode things.
    (Or at least yet anyway.  My four-year-old did ask the other day to build something with explosives that would go up to the sky.)

    We don't ride four-wheelers through the mud at 2 o'clock in the morning.
    (Or at least yet anyway.  My husband asks for every birthday and Christmas if the boys are old enough to get them go-carts yet.)

     We don't go out and fire off 40 rounds for fun.
     (Again, my husband says, all in good time.)

     So you see we're just farmers, we're not rednecks.  Yet, anyway.

     I had myself pretty well convinced of this.  And then the other day I texted my husband and asked, "Are we getting our Thanksgiving turkey from Walmart or Craigslist?"  And then I thought, Really, who am I kidding?

   (In our defense, though, at least we are not hunting our own wild turkey.  Although I'm pretty sure that's on the boys' bucket lists since their new favorite game is to pretend one of them is the Christmas turkey while the other boy chases him around the house trying to catch him and field dress him.)