Beast

Two farm stories from today...
 
ONE
This morning at the farm, John had me prepare some produce for donation to the Eastern Illinois Foodbank. It was a HUGE donation. You know those enormous cardboard bins at the grocery store that are usually filled with mountains of watermelons or pumpkins? Well, I filled one entirely with green kale, head lettuce, and bok choy. I also loaded pallets with racks of turnips, carrots, more kale, and more lettuce. It would take 100 people to eat that before it goes bad!

I felt a brief moment of panic, wondering what I would do if I were in charge of that excess produce. Are there even enough local food pantries and church-run grocery stores to distribute all of this in the next week?

Thankfully, our foodbank is part of a network of foodbanks. If they have too much lettuce and bok choy, they can ship it up to Chicago or down to St. Louis or out to Indianapolis for other food banks to distribute it before it goes bad.

TWO
I typically work outside in the field harvesting produce. There's another group of volunteers that works indoors to wash and pack the produce for sale/distribution. These volunteers are typically retired folks from the sponsoring church's congregation. A few of them have been doing this since the farm began. Now that the outdoor work has dwindled, I've been working in wash-pack more to get the last veggies of the season ready for sale. I emptied about 20 bins of produce for that foodbank donation. Then John asked me to clean and sanitize the newly emptied bins *sigh*

I like making messes more than I like cleaning them up :(

But I got to work anyway. It turned out to be more fun than I anticipated. I was banging and spraying and scrubbing these bins out when one of the wash-pack folks came in saying, "Susan, I could hear you scrubbing those bins as soon as I stepped out of my car!" She meant it in a fun, teasing way, but then I got all self-conscious about how much noise I was making. Come to think of it, I couldn't hear the other conversations in the room. But I really couldn't imagine a quieter way to scrub 10-gallon plastic bins in a stainless steel sink with a scrub brush the size of my head.

I kept working and the pile of clean bins grew as tall as I was. As I lifted another clean bin onto the stack, a different wash-pack veteran mused in awe, "You're a real *beast*, Susan." Though she didn't use the word "beast", if you know what I mean. The first one agreed, "Yeah, inside and outside both!" I was shocked and proud and happy and confused all at once. I think she gave me a compliment. They acted like it was. And later they asked for more information so we could get together every once in a while during the off season.

I was flattered. And confused. And we soon discovered that we are all left-handed. And then I had to leave to get Matthew. This story doesn't have a clean ending. I'm still trying to figure it out, myself. But it's a good thing to feel appreciated for doing something I enjoy :)