Moving to the country to work brings its own set of seasonal distractions.
by Dan Needles ❧ illustration by Shelagh Armstrong-Hodgson
The April rains are on their way and they will wash away the towering walls of snow in a mad torrent. I will watch the ice floes drift down the coulee behind the house, taking with them fence posts, gates, the neighbours’ lawn furniture and various items the winter winds have blown into the creek. Apart from the relief of being able to step off the veranda safely, there is now a possibility I can return to the keyboard and finish the novel I started last fall.
When I gave up my job in the city and moved to the country to write and raise sheep, I was pleasantly surprised by how much easier it was to get my writing done. If you remove the daily commute from your workday, plus the useless committee meetings and all the people popping their heads in the door to chat, you only have to work a couple of hours a day to get the same amount accomplished.
In those days of the mid-1980s, I was a lone pioneer of the home office and working remotely. But during the recent COVID lockdowns, pretty much everybody got a chance to do the same thing. Most people found they liked working from home a lot, and now the population of my small town has doubled as people have fled their boring office jobs in the city.
However, people who move out here are often startled by the surge of daily chores that come with life on a private well and a septic tank. There’s no condo board to call if a tree falls on your house or the pipes freeze. Your cell phone contact list skews away from life and fitness coaches in favour of plumbers, diesel mechanics and pest control experts.
People often ask me what I do for a living out here on the farm, and for the last four months the answer has been “I blow snow.” We endured the first old-fashioned winter in a decade here, and we are finally thawing out and blinking like dopey groundhogs in the spring sunshine.
A neighbour ploughed my lane for 30 years, but because liability insurance costs have gone up so high, nobody can afford to blow snow for rural customers anymore. If it doesn’t snow much, this isn’t a serious problem, but this year it snowed every day for weeks, like it did in Doctor Zhivago. Fortunately, I was sort of prepared. Two years ago, I cruised Facebook Marketplace and found a six-foot machine that would fit on the back of my Massey tractor and clear the driveway and the lane to the barn. I called the number wondering how many hours I would have to drive to find it.
“Hello, Dan,” said a voice. It was my friend Ross, a retired apple grower just 10 miles away. He was selling a very solid machine made a half-century ago in Grey County out of heavy-gauge steel you might use for an armoured personnel carrier or a turnip shredder. Ross assured me that 50 horsepower would run it just fine and he was right.
It is more of a snow fountain than a snow blower. The discharge chute has been clobbered from so many close encounters with low bridges that whatever snow the machine picks up has to go by my ears before it goes anywhere else. My daughter took one look at me plastered with snow during a Facetime call from Calgary and ordered me a new set of insulated coveralls and a ridiculous furry hat. When I tog up in the snow-blowing outfit, with mask and goggles, my wife explains to visitors that I have just received the bat signal and will now disappear on
a secret mission.
The snowblower is parked inside the barn ready for action. But I have to get to the barn first, which requires the use of another smaller walk-behind machine to make a path from the house. That machine is hard to start. I use a can of ether and my wife and I take turns pulling the starter cord until it coughs to life. The tractor also needs ether to start and usually has to be hooked up to a battery booster. By the time the tractor is in action, I’m already tired. When the lane is finally cleared and I stagger back into the kitchen, I need a proper nap. All those efficiencies I achieved years ago by moving away from the office in the city have been lost.
The snowblower is now in the way and must be dragged to a fence corner where it will sit in a forest of burdocks and thistles until next Christmas. Spring is a great relief, but it brings with it a host of fresh distractions: the gardens, the fences, and of course, the spring lambs.
I probably won’t finish that novel anytime soon.
Humorist and playwright Dan Needles lives on a small farm in Nottawa. His latest book is Finding Larkspur: A Return to Village Life (Douglas & McIntyre, 2023).
