Our Rural Roots

Meredith Bernard, Contributor

Being a farm wife has taught me a lot about life and even more about love. Twenty years ago, my idea of a "date night" looked a lot more like what I'd seen in the movies and a lot less like the reality of those I've come to know. But, if I could go back, I'd tell my younger self that reality can be so much better than the movies when we learn to love it for what it is.

I had no idea back then that the best date nights I'd ever know wouldn't be with my husband in a crowded restaurant. Instead, they'd be spent beside him in our ragged old farm truck on sunset drives scouting fields of corn and beans. I didn't know he'd prefer my cast iron steak to anything he could get anywhere else, and that I'd prefer to make it.

I didn't know loving a farmer would be manifested daily in holding gates, cutting hay string, slinging buckets of calf feed, fetching wrenches and shuffling equipment.

I didn't know loving a farmer would mean lunch sandwiches and sweet tea in a mason jar on a tailgate watching hawks circle over a fresh cut hayfield.

I didn't know loving a farmer would include shared tears over flooded crops and fears over crashed cattle markets.

I didn't know loving a farmer would mean saying "Yes" to learning and conquering new things when my mind would say "No, you can't."

I didn't know loving a farmer would be so hard at times ... and he didn't know loving me would be so hard at times, either. I also had no idea I'd love this life and my farmer more every day, for all he and we pour into making it all work -- together.

Loving a farmer is one of my greatest joys, and being loved by a farmer is one of my greatest gifts.

> Blogger Meredith Bernard writes, takes photographs and loves life from her North Carolina family farm. Follow her on Twitter @thisfarmwife, and visit her website at thisfarmwife.com.

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