269: Someone to Watch Over Me
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Okay America, here's something you don't run into every day. A six month pregnant lady, sitting on a tractor. Want me to start it? Sure. Okay. Susie lived on the farm for years before she ever got onto the tractor. Her husband John is the farmer in the family. Susie's here in rural Tennessee because of him. I was never like a person who idealized farm life. I didn't grow up on a farm. I grew up in suburbs. We didn't have a garden, like I didn't have any romance about farming. I knew people who grew up on farms and they were just poor. I mean that was my idea of farming more or less. She first got on the tractor because she had to. After John had a scare in the spring with a neurologic disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome. The timing was pretty bad. They'd already done the part of farming where you spend all the money to get the seeds into the ground. And then literally the day before the first harvest, the day before they were going to take the stuff to market for the first time, when they would first be making money. John went into the hospital. Eventually I was paralyzed, quadriplegic, couldn't swallow, couldn't walk, talk, couldn't shut my eyes, couldn't sleep. And we had no other help on the farm regularly. So we just decided to write off this year's farm. At that point Suzy was five months pregnant, going to the hospital every day where John needed more and more help. He's fine now but at the time they was scared. He was losing all neurologic control of all of his muscles and they had no idea how bad it was going to get. Suzy was also caring for their four-year-old daughter and they didn't have much family nearby to rely on. They just moved to the area two years before, didn't know people so well, didn't belong to a church. They knew the farmers in the farmer's market but didn't really socialize with them. They'd never been in each other's homes, for example. And so they were surprised when the farmers at the farmer's market put up a sign in John's booth at the market explaining his illness, collecting money for him. They opened up a fund, which I was, you know, they said, "Do you mind if we do that?" And at first I just thought, "Yeah." Because it's like, I said to John or I said to John's sister, maybe I said, "Does that mean people think we're poor?" I felt like a fund, you know, it just felt like, "We don't need a... I mean, well, we kinda need a fund." I was like, it's like, "All right, okay, right, right, right." So they said, "Okay, fine." So they set up this bank account, the fund, and they collected all this money. Suzy and John's next-door neighbor came by every day for six weeks and harvested their flowers and sold them from her booth at the market,
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