Carol Bly was an award-winning author of essays, short stories, and two nonfiction works on writing. Tobias Wolff has said that her stories possess "a tremendous moral rigor . . . even a moral ferocity."
In "Getting Tired," an essay in the book A Letter from the Country, the Minnesota author begins by describing a John Deere 6600 combine, which leads to reflections on the nature of modern farm work. In the following excerpt from that essay, Bly offers an extended definition of "monkeying" from a distinctly rural point of view.
from "Getting Tired"*
by Carol Bly (1930-2007)
The value of the 66 is that it can do anything, and to change it from a combine to a cornpicker takes one man about half an hour, whereas most machine conversions on farms take several men a half day. It frees its owner from a lot of monkeying.
Monkeying, in city life, is what little boys do to clocks so they never run again. In farming it has two quite different meanings. The first is small side projects. You monkey with poultry, unless you're a major egg handler. Or you monkey with ducks or geese. If you have a very small milk herd, and finally decide that prices plus state regulations don't make your few Holsteins worthwhile, you "quit monkeying with them." There is a hidden dignity in this word: it precludes mention of money. It lets the wife of a very marginal farmer have a conversation with a woman who may be helping her husband run fifteen hundred acres. "How you coming with those geese?" "Oh, we've been real disgusted. We're thinking of quitting monkeying with them." It saves her having to say, "We lost our shirts on those darn geese."
The other meaning of monkeying is wrestling with and maintaining machinery, such as changing heads from combining to cornpicking. Farmers who cornpick the old way, in which the corn isn't shelled automatically during picking in the field but must be elevated to the top of a pile by belt and then shelled, put up with some monkeying.
Selected Works by Carol Bly
- Letters from the Country, essays (Harper & Row, 1981)
- Changing the Bully Who Rules the World: Reading and Thinking About Ethics, essays (Milkweed, 1996)
- Beyond the Writer's Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction, nonfiction (Anchor, 2001)
* Carol Bly's "Getting Tired" originally appeared in her monthly column, "A Letter from the Country," in the Minnesota Public Radio Magazine. It was later published in Letters from the Country (Harper & Row, 1981, reprinted by the University of Minnesota Press in 1999).
