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Partly cloudy skies. Low 63F. Winds light and variable..

Partly cloudy skies. Low 63F. Winds light and variable.

Beth Dolinar has been writing her column about life, both hers and the rest of ours, for over 20 years. When not on the page, she produces Emmy-winning documentaries, teaches writing to university students, and enjoys her two growing children.

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For two summers during college, I worked full time at a farm. Except for my writing and television work, that was by far my favorite. It was there, at Simmons Farm in McMurray, that I built my affinity for any work that would put me under all that blue sky.

I’ve had other jobs before and since then: babysitter, grocery store bagger, project manager for a summer camp, radio D.J., library book shelver, college professor. Each had its frustrations – not to mention a paltry paycheck. The worst part of working at Giant Eagle was having to collect the shopping carts people would leave at the far edges of the parking lot. I liked the classroom part of teaching but not the correcting-papers part. The camp part of the summer camp job was fun; the managing was not. And I was a terrible D.J.

But that farm. Every morning I would put on shorts and a tank top and meet the crew by the truck that would carry us to the field. Early in the summer we would plant strawberry runners, a monotonous task of grabbing the little offshoots from the plants and poking them through plastic and into the dirt. Next came tomato-planting time, when I would sit at the back of a tractor and drop the baby plants into the holes dug by a machine that bounced between my knees. I would drive home covered in whatever that fertilizer it was.

Mid-summer was for cabbage picking. The girls could stand on the flatbed as the truck moved slowly through the rows. The guys had these big knives and would cut the cabbages and toss them to us to pack in crates. On dew-covered mornings, it was like catching wet bowling balls.

July brought my favorite chore, hoeing corn. The truck would drive us and our bag lunches to a far-flung field, drop us off with a big jug of water and assign us a row. For the next eight hours, we worked our way down the row, chopping out every other baby corn plant and then collaring the surviving ones with soil. It was mindless work. Sometimes we’d all talk, or sing – my fellow college students and I. One girl talked a lot about golf. Another about the men she was dating. Come 5 o’clock, the truck would bounce up over the hill to fetch us. I liked looking back at the long row I’d hoed; in a couple months we’d be picking corn.

My second summer there, I was invited to work in the barn. I asked a fellow worker what that was like.

“It’s cooler in there,” she said. “And it’s not physically hard.”

I gave it a try, standing next to the women who’d been doing this all their lives. As the tomatoes bobbled down a conveyor belt, I had to sort them according to size and quality. Like Lucy sorting chocolates with Ethel, I couldn’t keep up. The next day I was back on the truck, headed for the corn rows.

My television work is taking me to farms this summer, for a documentary that’s part of WQED’s commitment to workforce development in agriculture. We’re filming at county fairs, sunflower farms, dairy farms, even a robotics labs. I love being outdoors in the sunshine, talking to farmers about their work.

One film shoot took us to a farm that raises corn for ethanol. I walked behind the photographer, stepping over the corn rows, carrying the camera tripod like I’d carried the hoe all those years ago.

I was happy, working under all that blue sky once again.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com/.

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