The first Women in Denim event was held in Storm Lake Friday and Saturday Janaury 14th and 15th, 2005. This first event was intended to educate and empower rural women. Their featured speaker was Vara (Bones) Groot, Crestland class of 1960. Follows is part of her message.
"My 4 buckle books are what helped me make it through life this far," said Vara Groot, Manson, keynote speaker for the first Women in Denim conference held at the Buena Vista University campus. She gave a humorous look at her life on the farm.
"I grew up in town and thought I knew something about farming. I learned I was wrong. I married a farmer and I learned a lot of things I never thought of and I cried bushels of tears."
She married her husband during harvest, not realizing what that time of year meant to a farmer. Shortly after they were married, she was rudely awakened to learn men would be coming to help bale hay and she needed to prepare a lunch for a lot of guys'
There were many meals prepared and delivered to her busy husband over the years. "The trick is always to find the farmer. Is he at that field? Or that one? Or the one down the road? And did you know that tractors can hide over the littlest hills?"
She continued about her farm life. "I had a lot of things to learn like cattle are spooky." She soon learned that if she lowered her voice to resemble that of her husband's voice when she came into the barn, the voice the cattle were used to hearing, that the animals weren't so nervous about someone new entering their shelter and she wasn't so nervous around them.
"I learned to chase cattle. I played guard even though I was only a substitute. I did OK. I learned to outfox them. And then there was animal nutrition and what happens when it is a little bit off."
"I went to get my husband and told him we were needed to help sort cattle. I put on my buckle boots and my husband said, 'I don't think those boots are high enough.' We had had an extremely wet spring. I got out of the pickup and took four giant strides and I was stuck. And before long I saw this brownish, greenish ooze going over the top of my boots."
As her husband went on ahead of her, she wondered how she was going to get out of the mess. She had visions, she said, of a cherry picker having to be used to pull her out. She questioned the roaring audience if they knew what happened to night crawlers when they are pulled out of the ground? (Yes, she had visions that she would be ripped right in half !)
"I didn't fall but by the time I got unstuck, they were done sorting. I stomped to the pickup and asked my husband why he didn't tell me to watch where I was walking and he told me, 'I didn't think you'd listen.'"
She told of learning to drive the pickup and the various farm machinery. She even began to enjoy being out in the field as an operator of the equipment. "I enjoyed the solitude of being out in the field. The trouble is. . . there is always a fence." Vara admitted she had many close calls.
She looks back, and laughs along with everyone else, about her experiences on the farm, but she wouldn't trade farm life for anything.
"I think of the frost on the fence line and the icy glitter after a storm and when the sunsets and can see the outline of the farm and the black silhouettes of the buildings against the golden orange of bright pink sky. "How are you as 'a woman in denim?' You've learned to do the work when maybe you weren't cut out to do it. You've endured. You're stronger. Don't give up! You're all wonderful. I salute you."
Copied from the January 20, 2005 Storm Lake Pilot Tribune.