Thanks for Everything Aaron!

We lost Aaron the other day. No nothing tragic. Our part time hired hand just grew up and flew the nest. That’s him in the picture above bringing in our cows for the last time. Bummer.

We hired him several years ago at the ripe young age of 13. At least I think it was 13 or was it 12? Maybe 14? Well, I know for certain he was a lot shorter then and not as strong but he was always willing.

Willing. Not a common descriptive word for many teenagers. He was indeed willing, and each day he came to work for us he was more and more able. Because our farm is small and for the last 5 years our only source of income, we could never afford to hire Aaron (or anyone else) full time.

Heck, we can’t even afford us.

Aaron started with just a few hours once a week and by last summer he had the skills and once again the willingness to manage our entire farm for 7 whole days while we took our very first large family vacation together up in Michigan. Oh he had some help from his also very willing mom, she’s another one of those get-dirty-work-hard-farm-types, but the main responsibility was on Aaron’s shoulders and he–excuse me for this–shouldered it well. What a treat that was to not only get off the farm but to get out of the state! With the exception of a couple overnight trips it had been seven years since Keith had experienced a real vacation.

We so looked forward to Tuesdays when Aaron worked. While he milked cows and fed pigs I could catch up on the mundane paperwork part of this gig. Keith also had a helper for bigger projects, like fence building and hog relocations. It always seemed that on Tuesdays even though we were just 33% more in the way of help we got at least twice as much done as on the other days of the week.

But, time stands still for no (hired)man…and Aaron moved on to the greener pastures of something even wilder than our farm. He left for Montana Wilderness School of The Bible. He’ll be gone a year and with us hopefully vacating these premises ourselves in a few short weeks, the timing really could not have been better. But still we are going to miss our hired help.

Even more than that…we are going to miss Aaron.