Living on a farm has its challenges. One is being a fourteen-year-old girl! Farms are so full of boy jobs. One of those “boy jobs” is irrigating a field. I don’t know what I was thinking the day that I got all spruced up and beautiful before I had to go change the water.
I had great hopes that somehow I could do it without getting dirty. We were using siphon tubes. They are big funny-shaped pipes with a rubber neck that you would bury in the water and then pull out of the ditch while holding on to the rubber neck creating a siphon, making the water flow out of the ditch into the field. It took all I could do to pull them out of the ditch, but had managed to keep my white (of all colors) pants clean.
I was setting the last tube and was just congratulating myself for doing the impossible at keeping clean when I felt something funny, and looked down. I was standing in an ant hill. The ants were climbing fast, all over my shoes and heading to my knees. These ants bite.
My brain quickly calculated my three choices. One – get chewed alive by ants. No way! I hate getting bit. Two – stripping. Negative! I was clear out in the field a long way from cover. My third choice, and the one I opted to do was to jump into the muddy ditch! It worked beautifully. The ants floated away and so did my stupid idea of changing the water in white pants!
(These are the type of siphon tubes we used to irrigate some the fields on our farm.)
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