Fall Harvest
Look what just fell into our driveway this week -
-- literally off the turnip truck!
Its undeniably harvest time. There are all sorts of unidentifiable machinery out in every field, and trucks driving up and down our road loaded beyond their gills with ... produce. We're often pretty hard pressed to name what ever it is that is in the truck that is clogging traffic to 25 mph. At least at that speed we are able to get a pretty good look at the load - one of these days maybe we'll make it to the farmers market to put names to them.
Admittedly, the premise of this diary is to chronical our experiences as we transition into this very different agrarian lifestyle. So the arrival of the turnip (or what we have interpreted as a turnip. If we're wrong*... well then that simply goes to prove my point) immediately had us chuckling about turnip trucks and falling off of them. Then I started thinking.
First of all we didn't know what the idiom meant. According to Evan Morris' Word Detective: ['does it look like I fell off the turnip truck'] "seems to be a good example of an entire class of catch phrases based on urban-rural rivalry. The thrust of such phrases is, of course, that 'I am not a fool or a newcomer,' and, in this case, that 'I am not an ignorant country bumpkin who just arrived in the big city on a truck full of lowly turnips that I was dumb enough, on top of everything else, to fall off of.'"
Our problem, however, is the quite the opposite - city folk who are ignorant of farming ways. I have no idea, but it seems like I've heard that there is a trend of city dewllers spilling out into the rural areas, occupying spaces that have been vacated by farmers because of the general downturn in the economic reality for farming as a living. If so then someone ought to come up with an idiom for us. They probably have, but I haven't been paying attention.
Or, maybe the original idiom would work just as well for us, because I wouldn't doubt that we are in fact city-bumpkin enough to actually fall off the turnip truck. Assuming we could figure out which truck was carrying turnips.
~*~
* After discussing it yet again last night, because this thing has been sitting in our kitchen all week and it just begs to be discussed, I think we've decided this is not a turnip, but a sugar beet. Any other guesses?
-- literally off the turnip truck!
Its undeniably harvest time. There are all sorts of unidentifiable machinery out in every field, and trucks driving up and down our road loaded beyond their gills with ... produce. We're often pretty hard pressed to name what ever it is that is in the truck that is clogging traffic to 25 mph. At least at that speed we are able to get a pretty good look at the load - one of these days maybe we'll make it to the farmers market to put names to them.
Admittedly, the premise of this diary is to chronical our experiences as we transition into this very different agrarian lifestyle. So the arrival of the turnip (or what we have interpreted as a turnip. If we're wrong*... well then that simply goes to prove my point) immediately had us chuckling about turnip trucks and falling off of them. Then I started thinking.
First of all we didn't know what the idiom meant. According to Evan Morris' Word Detective: ['does it look like I fell off the turnip truck'] "seems to be a good example of an entire class of catch phrases based on urban-rural rivalry. The thrust of such phrases is, of course, that 'I am not a fool or a newcomer,' and, in this case, that 'I am not an ignorant country bumpkin who just arrived in the big city on a truck full of lowly turnips that I was dumb enough, on top of everything else, to fall off of.'"
Our problem, however, is the quite the opposite - city folk who are ignorant of farming ways. I have no idea, but it seems like I've heard that there is a trend of city dewllers spilling out into the rural areas, occupying spaces that have been vacated by farmers because of the general downturn in the economic reality for farming as a living. If so then someone ought to come up with an idiom for us. They probably have, but I haven't been paying attention.
Or, maybe the original idiom would work just as well for us, because I wouldn't doubt that we are in fact city-bumpkin enough to actually fall off the turnip truck. Assuming we could figure out which truck was carrying turnips.
~*~
* After discussing it yet again last night, because this thing has been sitting in our kitchen all week and it just begs to be discussed, I think we've decided this is not a turnip, but a sugar beet. Any other guesses?
Labels: Ranch
posted by Monica at Sun Pony |
2:52 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home