The time of year is upon us, when combines, grain trucks and other vehicles are frequently travelling to and from the fields in an attempt to get the crops harvested before the white stuff shows up.
I can remember as a little girl enjoying the moments we had as a family. My parents used to park the camper at the field furthest from home, knowing they wanted to work as late as possible to get the crop off. But with two little girls who needed their sleep and no one at home to watch over us, we camped out at the field next to the grain bins. Mom would tuck us into bed, making sure we crashed before she had to run for Dad to unload.
Once we got to more of a school age, it was harder to live the nomad lifestyle. Both my sister and I didn’t have to go to bed as early, so we would have a supply of books, crayons and toys in the grain truck to keep us occupied in between loads. Mom used to let us climb into the box of the grain truck when there was only a small amount of grain in the back to play, where many of our ‘grain angels’ were covered by the next hopper full.
Mom and Dad had a great system of unloading ‘on the go’. Using the old-school CB radios and hand signals, they would communicate back and forth. Dad could see into the grain box from the combine, where he would let Mom know to pull ahead or hang back so the grain would stay in the box. Mom would use her side mirrors to make sure she stayed the right distance away from the combine and to keep the auger down the centre of the truck. Watching the two of them was something magical, almost like the ending of Sleeping Beauty where the prince and princess dance off into the clouds.
As my sister and I got older, we would spend our Friday and Saturday nights talking to Mom and listening to whatever we could on the radios, AM or CB. It was not uncommon for us to pick up other CB radios talking back and forth, usually in the deep south of America. One night, we kept hearing a Â鶹ÊÓƵern man over the CB talking about ‘Banana’ dying. At first, we didn’t understand who ‘Banana’ was, thinking it may have been a beloved pet or a nickname of another driver from the Â鶹ÊÓƵ. It wasn’t until we turned on the AM radio where we learned ‘Banana’ was Princess Diana and we'd been hearing about her untimely death.
By the time I was in high school, there were often notes left by Mom on things that needed to be done when we got off the bus. Usually the tasks were simple: turn the roast and add more water, empty the dishwasher, peel potatoes for supper, etc. We girls were also often asked to do some baking, not only for the field but for our school lunches as well. One time, my sister and I were asked to do up raisin bran muffins and we decided to have a bit of fun at the same time. We gathered up everything we needed, including Mom’s handwritten recipe, and pretended to film a cooking show. Now, whenever we were asked to do baking, we were always told to double the recipe, so that is what we did with the muffins. We ran out of bran, so we made a call to the neighbour, who was just about to leave for the field near our yard. She dropped off the ingredient for us and carried on her way. Mom saw the neighbour coming into the yard and leaving while she was unloading the truck into the bin and was curious about why the quick visit. Mom stopped the neighbours as they were driving back home, to discover that we were short on the bran needed for the muffins. Mom knew she had more than enough bran to do the recipe, so she stopped in to check in on us. The sight she saw was two girls, with three of the biggest bowls they could find, filled to the brim with raisin bran muffin batter, and only a few dozen cooked muffins.
“What is going on in here?” said Mom
“We are making the muffins you wanted,” we replied.
Mom looked at the huge mess we had made and requested to look at the recipe, knowing we had made a wrong turn somewhere. After asking us how many cups of bran we used, she soon realized that we had doubled the recipe — the recipe she had already doubled when writing it on the card. We had in fact quadrupled the recipe. We ended up putting the left-over uncooked batter in the fridge for the night and the cooked muffins in containers and bags before freezing some of them and we were not short on muffins for quite some time.
