Mary Elizabeth Fricke's story shows the extraordinary courage of the ordinary woman. She was raised in a farm family but looked forward to fulfillment as a mother and homemaker. She had never done "men's work", never aspired to it, never even learned to drive a shift car. Then she fell in love with and married a farmer. And in the Farm Crisis of 1986, when the need arose, she found the strength to transform herself from traditional woman to full-time farm worker.Her first job was clipping the tusks and tails of, and vaccinating, one hundred three-day-old pigs while their terrifying six hundred pound mothers loomed over her. When she emerged from the farrowing room (after spending five hours on a job that would have taken her husband or his father no more than an hour) she was exhausted but exhilarated. She had met her first challenge.Mary found herself helping to care for a 1,500-sow herd of pigs, operating the enormous, dangerous machinery the modern farmer uses for field work, putting in long hours of arduous labor under the most trying conditions, often to be frustrated in the end by natural calamities beyond human control.Mary Fricke's utterly honest and gripping account of daily life on a Missouri farm describes in graphic detail the Frickes' struggle to hold on to the family farm and why it continues, what rural life is all about today and what it means to her. Hers is the authentic voice of an modern American farm woman, clear-eyed, unsentimental and indomitable. Read Less