There they stood… the real workers of the farm… lined up in the shelter, staring out across a muddy, waterlogged barnyard while I filled their feed bunk on a cool, rainy April morning.
I finished up chores and realized that one group still hadn’t come out to eat.
Now… I knew why.
The mud was bad.
But it wasn’t bad because of the rain.
It wasn’t bad because of the ewes.
It was bad because of me.
You see, there’s always been this low spot in the barnyard. Been there for years. And every time it rained, I’d stand there and shake my head at the mess.
But the truth is… there was nowhere for the water to go.
So for years, I “worked on it.”
Little ditches here… a shallow pond there… none of it going anywhere. Just enough effort to feel like I was doing something… without actually fixing anything.
Meanwhile, in my head?
Endless ideas.
Tiles. Catch basins. Call up Excavator Adam. Rework the whole barnyard. Move fences. Change how the sheep flow through the yard.
Hundreds of ideas over the years.
But if I’m being honest… I always knew the answer.
I just didn’t want to accept it.
What needed to be done was simple.
A ditch. Straight through my path. The one I walk every day. The one I drive through now and then.
A ditch that runs downhill and lets the water out to the field.
And once you dig it… it’s there forever.
So I didn’t.
Until that morning… standing there in the rain… with the ewes lined up, looking out… then back at me.
Just… waiting.
Like, “Well? You expect us to walk through that?”
I stood there for a minute, rain running down my coat, and thought…
Yeah.
Fair enough.
And that was it.
The tails were wagging the dog.
Management had been overruled.
So I grabbed the shovel.
Within an hour or so, the ditch was dug—right across my path—and just like that… the water started moving. The yard started drying.
Problem solved.
I came into the house a little later than usual and said to Anne, “Well… I finally did it. I quit worrying about what mattered to me and put the ewes’ needs first and dug that ditch.”
She looked at me like I was a bit off.
“What are you talking about?”
And fair enough… why would she know?
I’d never really shared that five-year-long argument I’d been having in my own head.
But to me… it all made perfect sense.
The week’s been fine since.
I step over the ditch a few times a day. The equipment hasn’t gotten stuck in it… yet. The sheep have dry feet.
And I assume they appreciate it… though they haven’t said so.
I guess it’s about listening.
Not the kind where someone tells you what to do…
but the kind where the answer’s been sitting there so long, you stop hearing it.
Funny thing is… nothing really changed that day.The fix was simple. The work wasn’t hard.
It just took me five years to get out of my own way.
And in the end…
it wasn’t the rain, or the mud, or even the sheep that solved it.
It was finally deciding to stop arguing with myself.
Farmer Rod