When I was a little girl, my grandfather owned a small farm in Michigan. When it came time for the spring plowing, I often walked behind my grandpa as he held the reins of the team of horses that were hitched to a four-bottom plow. I usually had an old empty coffee can grandma gave me for picking up earthworms and nightcrawlers from the fresh furrows, so we could fish the many lakes in Calhoun County.
The horses pa used wore thick leather flaps attached to the bridle that kept the horses from seeing to the side. He called them blinders. Always full of a hundred questions, I asked him why the horses had to wear them. He said “So they’ll keep looking straight ahead.”
“Why,” I asked. “Why should they keep looking straight ahead?”
“To keep them from getting distracted by rabbits or coons or blackbirds.” He stopped long enough to give me an answer that he thought would silence me for a while, and told me to hop up on the bar that held his metal seat in place.
“Look down there to the other side of the field,” he said. Do you see that old oak tree? It’s right straight ahead of where we are now; do you see it?” Yes, I saw it.
“When I plow, I find something like that tree straight ahead of each row, and I keep my eyes on that thing and plow toward it. If the horses don’t get distracted, the furrow we’re plowing will be straight. But if I lose sight of my goal or the horses jig sideways because they spot a rabbit, the row will be crooked. If this row is crooked, the next one lined up beside it will be crooked. When we plant seeds, we follow the furrow and if the furrow is crooked, the rows of corn will be crooked.”
“But why does it matter if the corn is crooked?” I asked.
“It matters to me,” he answered in a tone that signaled that he was finished with this conversation. I hopped down from the plow and went back to picking up fishing worms.
In the more than seven decades since, I’ve thought a lot about plowing a straight furrow. I’ve had reason to consider distractions and when they are and are not a good thing. I’ve seen the results of a field where a crooked furrow followed the one before it and the crops that then followed suit. I’ve thought about why keeping my eyes on the far away goal is important, and why horses wear blinders because they can’t remember why they’re out there in the field in the first place and can be distracted by a rabbit, why someone wiser must hold the reins.
And I am hoping as I look back over my field of service, that the rows have been mostly straight and the crops have been mostly full and that there have been plenty of seeds left over for another season.
