by W. Arthur
This farm, this land, is my life and I love it. I particularly enjoy sitting here on my wide front porch, as I am now, rocking gently in this Boston rocker that has been handed down through five generations. It's early summer and I am finally able to relax after another fourteen hour day. It is, indeed, a hard life, but I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
I gaze up at the vast sky, alive with a swirl of evening colors: dark orange, dark gray, slate blue. A few stars are visible as night begins to spread its blanket over the land. The air is starting to cool. A few crickets sound their evening mating call. The smell of newly mown hay and damp earth fills my nostrils. The cows are grazing lazily in the pasture after being milked.
Across the road, Kate, my sister-in-law, also sits on her front porch. I smile at her knowingly. Perhaps she has just come outside after cleaning up the kitchen; perhaps she has just helped put her new grandson to bed. And I think it won't be that long before I become a grandmother, as our oldest daughter, Laura, is in her eighth month. Such is the way of things, the rhythm and cycle of life here in rural southern Ohio.
Over by the gigantic hundred-year-old barn, Adam is washing the blades on the new combine. I watch as he methodically moves the hose from one blade to another. I note how his manly body, the same body that has captivated me for twenty-four years, fills out his dirty jeans and sweaty t-shirt. I think about how much I love him, how I love him more each day, and how grateful I am that he fell in love with me, gave me this life, and patiently helped me (sometimes through firm but loving correction) become a good country wife.
Then I think about how my father-in-law, if he was still alive, would laugh to hear me say that I was grateful. Even though he never expressed them, I know he had his doubts when Adam introduced this girl from a middle class suburb of Cleveland to his family all those years ago. I had my doubts too. But whatever doubts I may have had were soon replaced with the good feelings that come with hard but meaningful work, work that produces something tangible and valuable. After all, what is more valuable than food?
I think about how I was growing up, about how I was raised. My mother was an early feminist who would have marched into hell for any one of a dozen feminist causes. I was weaned on the biographies of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Other kids I knew listened to popular fairy tales or Disney fantasies. My mother read me and my two older sisters The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening.
She was a professor of women's studies who believed in and preached female empowerment ("Remember: Never ever sacrifice your identity to a man, any man, for any reason."). My father, a mild-mannered professor of English literature, wisely stayed in the background. If he ever had any doubts about his wife's feminist ideology and activist personality, he was never foolish enough to express them.
I sometimes wonder now how she would react to the #MeToo movement that is currently sweeping the country. Sadly, I'll never know. She died two weeks after the 2016 presidential election. Susan, my oldest sister, told me after the funeral that our mother begged us to 'advance the torch,' as she put it just before she died.
Well, perhaps Susan and Elizabeth, my other sisters, may continue the crusade. But I won't be joining them. There are very few liberals (or liberated women, for that matter) in this part of Ohio. I won't say how I voted in the 2016 election, but I know how everyone else voted. This area is steeped in tradition, and I have come to accept and appreciate that sometimes preserving tradition can be a good and necessary thing.
My mother and I had some rather heated discussions when I told her I was marrying a farmer and moving to a small town she had never heard of. She actually liked Adam and was polite and gracious to his family the few times we all got together. What she didn't like was that I was 'giving myself up' to a man, that I would never be able to assert myself as a strong and empowered woman. "This is not how you were raised," she said.
I countered this by saying that Mary Shelley had been the product of two of the most liberal people in eighteenth century England, and yet she 'gave herself' to Percy Shelley at a young age. And, in spite of that, she was still able to produce one of the most enduring novels in western literature. My mother had no answer to that argument and never uttered another word of protest.
In truth, if she had known just how much I had given myself up to Adam, she probably would have tried to have me kidnapped and sent to one of those de-programming camps. Now, I won't say I am a submissive wife or that Adam is a dominant husband. The way I see it, maintaining a sub/dom relationship is more of a game than a lifestyle. Simply put, out here on the farm, between the endless chores and raising both children and animals, we have no time for such games.
This area is, however, a man's country, and Adam is the undisputed head of our household, a role and a responsibility he has always taken very seriously. And, yes, occasionally that role includes the application of discipline when necessary. And, yes, in this part of the world, discipline nearly always involves corporal punishment... spanking for the uninitiated.
Has my husband ever spanked me? Of course. He's spanked me many times. But only when I deserved it and only to help me become the good country wife I have aspired to be. I have never enjoyed being spanked, but I've accepted it as part of the package, so to speak. I knew full well when I married Adam that I wasn't just marrying the man; I was marrying the lifestyle. And, as a result of my acceptance of that lifestyle, I've become a much stronger and, in a strange way, more empowered woman than I would have if I'd moved back to Cuyahoga County and married some wimpy financial analyst or lawyer.
When I have time to ponder the flow of my life, or at least the last twenty-four years, I do sometimes wonder how we got together in the first place. As I said, I was raised by very liberal and very well-educated parents in a middle class suburb of Cleveland where all the original farm land had been paved over long ago. On the other hand, Adam grew up on a farm - this farm - near the small town of Pomeroy.
Most of my childhood experiences revolved around my friends in school, exploring the shopping malls and spending carefree summers on the beaches of Lake Erie. At the same time, Adam spent his summers working the farm along with his father and two older brothers. He could drive a tractor at the age of eight. Occasionally, they would go into town on a Saturday night or fish along the banks of the Ohio River. But mostly they stayed home, milking cows and coaxing corn and soybeans from the fertile soil, all the while praying (yes, literally praying) for good weather, the perfect blend of rain and sunshine.
Perhaps because he was the youngest, Adam had a bit more ambition than his two brothers. After high school, he enlisted in the army and spent three years operating and maintaining tanks. After he was discharged, he took the money he had saved and enrolled at Ohio State - in the agriculture college, of course. I spent the first summer after high school working at a clothing store in the mall and going out with my friends. I only went to college because my parents demanded it and my grandmother offered to pay for it. Also, I heard there were good parties off campus, and I thought of myself as a 'party girl'.
For the first two years, I changed majors three times, went to parties where drugs and alcohol were abundant, lost my innocence and virtue completely, and barely passed my classes. I met Adam in the fall quarter of our junior year when we were in the same business class. Purely by chance, we ended up sitting next to each other.
Almost from the first, I was attracted to him. He was (and still is, I'm happy to say) a ruggedly handsome and solidly built man. And I couldn't help but be impressed by the fact that it didn't seem to bother him at all that he came to class dressed in old jeans and work boots. It was obvious that he had come to learn and was going to take the class seriously, while most of the rest of us looked at the class only as a requirement for our majors, a minor hurdle we had to jump to get to the proverbial finish line.
I could tell at a glance that he was a farm boy - the kind my friends and I had made fun of. But I found myself drawn to him anyway, partly because of his looks and stolid demeanor, partly because I was intrigued. Unlike a lot of the guys I had met in Columbus, he seemed to regard me - when he regarded me at all - simply as a fellow student, not as a 'pretty young co-ed, out for a good time and looking to get drunk and laid.' In other words, he was a challenge that I found irresistible, and I began to employ the strategy that has ensnared most unsuspecting men throughout modern history.
For the first few weeks, I confined my efforts to making casual conversation - asking his name, where he was from, what his major was, that sort of thing. However, when that strategy didn't get him to notice me, I took the more direct approach, the sure ploy that has been snaring young men for at least the last century or so. I told him I was having trouble with the class and asked him if he would help me study for an upcoming exam. Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed. We set up an appointment for the following Sunday afternoon at my apartment. I would have preferred having him over on a Saturday night; however, he worked in the cow barns across the Olentangy River and was on duty until Sunday morning.
When he arrived, he was even more handsome than ever in his jeans and boots. I offered him a beer and he drank it just before we got down to the business at hand. We studied for about an hour, with me getting as close to him as I could without being too obvious. When I decided that he had helped me enough to get through the exam (which wasn't at all difficult), I offered to cook dinner for him. Once again, he accepted, and I made spaghetti. While we ate, we talked and soon discovered that we had, at least on the surface, absolutely nothing in common. However, as it turned out that didn't matter, as judging by the way he kept looking at me, he seemed to be as attracted to me as I was to him, at least physically.
So, after about an hour's worth of dead end conversation, I invited him to spend the night with me - I just had to know if he was as good a lover as he looked.
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