At The Farm Gate
February 2008
By Joanie Stiers



Late winter in Illinois farm country is like Mother Nature’s ninth month of pregnancy. She is uncomfortable, emotional and craves salt-tinged, sloppy roads until she gives birth to the beauty of tulips, budding trees and green grass of spring.
The scenic reasons to join rural Illinois country living are plentiful. Among my favorites are the sight of flickering lightning bugs above a corn field on a summer evening, the smell and colors of fall harvest, frozen fog on winter’s leafless trees, and the spring calves prancing outside Grandma’s kitchen window.
But Mother Nature shows rural Illinois’ imperfections in late winter, when scenes turn ugly and conditions uncomfortable. For this reason, I became concerned two years ago when the first farm visit for my brother’s suburban mother-in-law-to-be would be in late winter. She still allowed the marriage and has returned for visits, which gave her a second chance to appreciate the peace and beauty of her daughter’s new home far outside the city limits.
Late winter has farmers and country residents looking forward to greener days. The temperature bounces between freezing and thawing. Then snow melts, which exposes last year’s browned roadside grasses, creates boot-sucking mud and shows any other color similar to what happens when my 2-year-old daughter dips her paintbrush in every watercolor before touching the paper. That same color is painted on our minivan and pickup truck. The vehicles are filthy enough to make most car wash-bound motorists feel unworthy.
“You can grow grass on the side of this truck,” my husband said on an abnormally warm 65-degree day recently. We were among 10 vehicles to wait in a local car wash line, except we were the only vehicle that appeared to have found a mud road to test the four-wheel drive. In reality, we had driven to the family farm a few times. We waited at the stall nearest the coin machine, so every quarter-less person could have walked by our truck and autographed it. We spent 23 minutes washing the truck, long enough to make the person behind us vacuum his floor mats.
Country road surfaces vary, but farmers break them into two main categories: hard surfaces and gravel. The latter perhaps is the most romanticized of basic rural living, but also is the messiest. In late winter, you need only drive a mile on these soft, thawed roads to coat the car with mud to its sideview mirrors. I have proof in my high school scrapbook, where the spirit of March Madness is written in dirt instead of shoe polish. My car said “Go Bombers,” “Elite 8” and “#1” in finger-stroke widths on the door, hood and bumper when our boys’ basketball team went to state.
The softness of gravel roads makes moving farm equipment and hauling grain away from on-farm storage nearly impossible. When the road surface finally dries enough to make some dust, “field fever” begins for area farmers. Like most of common society, my family craves a steakhouse dinner, movie or shopping trip in early February. By late winter, though, the itch is to be in the field to get a head start for this year’s corn and soybeans. The farmers become as anxious as expectant mothers past their due date.