There’s a woman on Instagram I follow for no reason other than
she is so very unlike me. She and her
husband are farmers out on the wide Dakota plains where they raise goats,
rabbits, chickens, and pigs and keep horses.
Their rambling yard is filled with big dogs; cats live in the barn. Her children are still young, under ten. Almost every picture I see of the woman, she
is shooting a gun, getting a tattoo, or has just killed a snake with a hoe.
Recently, the polar vortex has walloped her young
family. Several days ago, her husband
drove into town for groceries, a trip of many miles. A massive front along the western horizon was growling
and bearing its icy teeth. Likely, it
was the reason for the supply run. The front
attacked while he was in town, unleashing a drifting white out. He and the supplies became stranded when all
county roads were closed. The woman, a
random pick on Instagram, is out on the farm with no help caring for their
animals and children. Everything is
frozen and the snow is piling so high she can record the disappearance of the
barn in two hour intervals. The water
pumps are frozen and have stopped working.
She has to haul water out to the barn by the bucket, making scores of
trips to supply all their many animals.
Her dog, blanketed by falling snow to nothing more than a snout and a
pair of eyes, watches over her. He will
not go in the house and leave her alone in severe weather.
And now the baby goats are coming; born into sub-zero
temperatures with wind chill in the -70 range.
Despite everything else this woman is handling alone out on the frozen
tundra, she is now posting pictures of the most adorable baby goats, each no
more than a few pounds, all fuzzy and bright-eyed, wobbling toward the warmth
of her. Exposure would kill these babies
overnight. But this farm woman, whose name I don’t even
know, has cut up all her and her husband’s socks, making little head holes at
the toe and leg holes in the foot. The
kid babies are bouncing around in the barn wearing their wooly sock jackets and
bleating at the moon.And I love this woman so hard right now.
