By Julie
Carter
I feel certain
that the saying "behind every good man is a good woman" was born in agriculture.
Quite possibly it dates back to when agriculture was in its earliest crude form
of poking a stick in the ground and dropping in a seed of corn.
While
agricultural methods today are somewhat improved, the role of "little woman"
hasn't changed much. She picks up the slack wherever needed and that led to
another famous phrase — "a woman's work is never done."
Women in general
are a tough lot but for the purposes of this pat on the back to the "little
purty" as she is often referred to, I'm narrowing the topic to ranch women.
A ranch wife
will leave at daylight with the boss — after breakfast is cooked, kitchen tidied
up, horses saddled and lunch packed. Many of those days there is no lunch
because the all-day event was one of those "it'll-only-take-us-a-little-while"
projects. They will be horseback all day fighting the elements and the cows to
get the work done. All the things that can go wrong usually
do.
She will find a
way to shut a barbwire gate that only a he-man body builder would be able to
pull up to the post. She will sit and wait patiently for hours on end right
where he told her to wait. Then she will find out he expected her to read his
mind when he changed his mind. Later, she will take a cussin' that should really
have been for the cow that ticked him off in the first
place.
And when it's
all done, she'll come home to a cold dark house, build a fire, fix a meal and
get ready to do it all over again. Somewhere in there, she'll squeeze in the
grocery shopping, the laundry, house cleaning and bill paying. That has to be
done in her spare time, whenever that is.
When she has an
important event she would like him to attend with her, he uses his over burden
of work and lack of time to get out of it. So she rises to the task and helps
him get the work done so they can go together to something he didn't want to go
to in the first place. When he has an event and she's too busy, he goes alone.
She may only be
just over five foot tall but stature has nothing to do with guts and grit.
She'll sit in a saddle in a blizzard helping to drive a cow to a gate that not
even the cow can see. After it's all done, she'll coil up her wet freezing rope,
peel the ice from her batting eyelashes and tell him how much she loves working
with him.
She would love a
thank you and pat on the back for job well done. But most often he just thinks
of it as getting done what had to be done. He won't stop and ponder the fact
that the "little woman" is the best help he has because she is more often than
not, the only help he has.
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