The Girl Who Carried the Farm Sign

The call came on a Wednesday afternoon while I was matching fuel tickets at the co-op, three days before the county fair parade.

It was Donna Moe, who has run the parade committee since before I could drive.

“Kristin, honey, I’ve got your mom’s rider list here for the Gustafson float,” she said. “I just want to make sure I have it right before I print the lineup sheets.”

I told her to go ahead. I figured she wanted a spelling checked. Half the county has a Gustafson or a Gustavson or a Gustafsen somewhere in the family, and Donna likes things right.

“I have Arne and Marlene on the wagon. I have Owen Holm, age five. I have Ben Holm driving the tractor. And then a note.”

She stopped. I heard paper move. “Your mom wrote that Lily won’t be riding.”

I set my pen down on the fuel tickets. Out the office window, a grain truck was idling at the scale, and I watched the driver lean out to punch his number in while I waited for the rest.

“Did she say why?” I asked.

Donna is a kind woman, and she did not want to say it. She said it anyway, because she knew I would find out.

“She said Lily is from your first marriage. She said the float is for the Gustafson family, and Lily has her own people. Those were her words, honey. I’m sorry.”

The float I paid for

You have to understand what that float was to us. That spring, the Minnesota Farm Bureau and the State Fair had named Dad’s place a Century Farm.

A hundred years in one family, 160 acres outside town, still farmed.

They sent a certificate in a cardboard folder and a metal sign for the end of the driveway.

Dad read the letter at the kitchen table three times with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, then pretended he had dust in his eye.

The fair board asked every new Century Farm family to enter the parade. Mom said it would be too much work.

Dad said nothing, which with my father means he wanted it so badly he could not trust his voice.

So I said I would build the float. I’m a bookkeeper. I like a project with a list and a budget, and I wanted to give my dad one morning where the whole county looked at him and clapped.

The base was Dad’s old flat hay wagon, the one he used to pull behind the 4020 when I was a girl stacking small squares in July.

The deck boards had gone soft in two places. Ben and I replaced them on a Saturday.

I kept every receipt, because that’s who I am. Deck lumber and screws, $286. Two-by-fours and plywood for the railing and the backdrop, $190.

Straw from the Lindgren place, $72. Bunting, $138. Paint, brushes, zip ties, and a new safety chain for the hitch, $214.

That came to $900, give or take the sales tax, and it came out of our checking account, not my parents’. Ben never said a word about the money. He just asked which saw I wanted.

And every single night for two weeks, Lily was out there with me in Dad’s machine shed. She was eleven. She held the tape measure.

She stapled bunting until her thumb got a blood blister, and she wrapped it in a paper towel and kept going.

She was the one who found the old sign.