The Minnesota Farm Woman

Gardening is hard work. Even harder than the actual gardening is preparing the garden for planting. This week, I have been shoveling loads of chicken manure and composted horse manure into the wheelbarrow and hauling it to the garden to enrich my raised beds. This type of hard labor gives me plenty of time to think, and for some reason, my mind turned to all the silly words that we use when trying to describe someone who is full of baloney. That’s one right there. How about balderdash, poppycock, and hogwash? There’s also hooey, drivel, and bunk. Horsefeathers, hokum, and malarkey come to mind, and who can forget blarney? It made me wonder why there are just so many words that mean the same thing, but while loading my umpteenth shovel of manure, I had a epiphany: It had to be politics. From the first moment the first politician made the first promise he couldn’t keep, the words echoed from around our great country from citizens and constituents. The political scene has changed over the years from simple honest people trying to make this country a better place to live to a non-compromising partisan system whose wealthy candidates argue a lot and line their pockets with the money donated from those even wealthier. Frankly, I am not looking forward to the next couple of years when we will have to hear about every skeleton pulled from every closet of every candidate along the campaign trail. I don’t often talk politics, but when I do and if you were to ask me what my political affiliation is, I am a little to the right of the left and a little to the left of the right. That means I mix equal parts of horse manure chicken poo, handle my plants gently, use my limited budget wisely, and tell the truth when I am too tired to pull another weed. My garden is not perfect, but it feeds us and makes me happy. If the politicians were to treat our world like a garden full of different varieties of plants, it would certainly become a better place, or at least the political climate would be much more tolerable. Political candidates used to stand on soapboxes so they could be seen and heard as they voiced their opinions. It is time for me to get off mine and back to that other pile of manure.