Alice Murcheson liked to give at least half an hour every day to going over ag reports from Earth. However, with the news becoming progressively more grim with every passing day, she was finding it more and more difficult to read them. After all, there were so many things she needed to deal with right here in Shepardsport, things that she actually had some control over.
She’d gotten back to the apartment for the evening when she realized it had been almost a week since she’d last gone through those reports. While it might be easier to let them get crowded out by various tasks up here, it was not a good habit to let herself slip into.
Which meant it was time to sit down, grit her teeth, and deal with the bad news. The longer she put it off, the more likely it became that she’d get blindsided by something she should’ve picked up if she’d been on top of things.
Not that there’s a whole lot we can do about stuff on Earth. On the other hand, at least we’ll have some warning of interruptions of critical supplies.
As she’d expected, the ag reports made grim reading. The more intervention any given crop required, the more likely production was going to be disrupted for this growing season. At least most grain crops that were already in the fields would probably turn out well enough, although the big question might end up being whether there would be sufficient workers available to harvest in a timely manner.
Alice recalled her own childhood on a grain farm near Duluth. They’d raised a mixture of winter wheat, short-season corn and soybeans, and there had been times when getting the corn out in time was tricky. She recalled at least two years when early snows had caught them with corn still in the fields, and they’d lost a lot of it. There were tricks to recovering some, like running the combine only in one direction to pick up the fallen stalks, but it still didn’t get as much as they would’ve gotten in a timely harvest.
She’d become so deep in this grim news that she didn’t even notice the door opening or her husband walking in until he rested his hand on her shoulder. “Alice?”
Startled, she had to quick squelch a flinch as soon as she recognized him. “Sorry, Bill, I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
He pulled up a second chair beside her, set to working on the muscles of her neck with those big strong hands that were so deft with the controls of an airplane or a spacecraft. “You’ve got a lot of company right now, sweetheart. I just got an e-mail from Fred.”
An icy lump formed in Alice’s stomach. Her own parents had been pushed out of farming back in the 80’s, and all of her brothers and sisters had found employment in other fields. By contrast, Bill’s family had made the right choices to enable them to go big when the alternative was to get out, and now owned several dairy farms in addition to the old home place.
“How bad?”
“Not as bad as it could be. He hadn’t been writing because he didn’t want to worry me.”
Alice considered whether to remark upon that, decided to leave it alone. “So how bad is it?”
“So far they’re making do. But I know he’s said some of their neighbors aren’t, and I think he’s feeling really cut off because he can’t go anywhere. They haven’t had church in ages, restaurants are closed, and it sounds like the feed store is no place to hang out and chew the fat these days.”
“And isolation is almost harder on people than physical privation.” Although it had been years since she took that psychology course as part of her gen-ed requirements at U-Minn, she still remembered the studies on the effects of isolation on monkeys, the accounts of prisoners in Vietnam.
“It was one of the big things that either made or broke the early settlers, back the day.”
“True.” Alice closed one after another farm report. “And right now I really ought to write to my brothers and sisters. I’ve let myself get too busy with things up here.”