Farmer's Tan

An entire segment of society exists who understand the term “farmer’s tan”. Everyone in the Midwest has a mental picture of a father, uncle, grandfather, or even a favorite guy at church (they don’t wear their seed corn caps on Sunday morning) leap into the frontal lobe, triggering the smile reflex.

Field work begins early in the spring and ends late in the fall. Farm animals need tending year ‘round, and pert’ near everyone keeps their livestock outside and/or in a barn, away from the house. Sorry to sound condescending, Midwesterners, but you know how city folk are. They don’t have a clear picture of farming, and often wonder about things, like do we keep pigs and chickens in our actual homes, even when they aren’t sick.

People who farm are going to get tan, there’s no getting around it. They get tan because they’re outside working, and they don’t even notice. I’m not sure if they put on sun screen, but I bet some of them do now that we know too much sun can either kill us or age us prematurely. Right. Just like some dairy farmers have started drinking skim milk.

You don’t wear shorts and sandals to farm. I’ve seen some of the guys wearing tank tops, but there are no metrosexuals in the country. Farm workers are very, very tan people – tan in places, that is. Their arms are tan from about mid-bicep down, including their hands if they aren’t fencing or baling hay. Their necks are gorgeous copper browns, as are their faces, up to the eyebrows. From there, the Pioneer or John Deere cap protects the farm worker’s head from too much sun, and their eyes from too much glare. Some of them will wear sunglasses – Oakleys – but most of them depend on the brims of their caps.

We’d visit our farming uncles when I was a girl. Uncle Harry never had a full tan on his face. He’d come in every noon for dinner and every evening for lunch (the turned-around names for the town versions of lunch and dinner), get washed up, and leave his hat in the mudroom. His big ol’ white forehead sat right there on top of his eyebrows, as his brown arms reached for the rolls and mashed potatoes. When we’d visit my Uncle Dean, it was the same thing. Uncle Dean sold Pioneer Seed Corn for many years, but he still bore half a pale face.

Farmer’s tans are a staple of rural culture, an understood event that draws no attention. City folk don’t see so many farmer’s tans, so they have a tendency to stop and stare, wondering why those people don’t take their off hats and even out their faces, or their shirts so they can brown up their shoulders and backs a little.

Those of us who live in town, and who believe we are prematurely aging in our fifties, are beginning to make choices. From the mid-1980’s, some of us have used tanning beds to achieve the all-over tan we found irresistible. Do that and you’ll pay, said the dermatologists. Assuming they meant someone else, we carefully timed ourselves as we were “laying a base” in early April. Burns, we heard from the fashion experts, were what caused cancer. Tans just caused premature aging. There, you dermatologists. Harpers did a lot of research to bring us this good news, so what do you know? Besides, who thinks about aging when you aren’t old?

Buddy Pat and I have advanced together through our life stages. Our daughters were born one week apart, and for the first seven years of their lives, that was the only week they weren’t together. Running things past Buddy Pat became second nature to me. We both have plenty of other friends we cherish dearly, but Buddy Pat and I always seemed positioned for the big stuff together. It’s one of those soul-sisterhoods, easy and not at all demanding.

I was talking to Buddy Pat on the phone the other day. We always start out having a regular conversation, exchanging information and catching up. She’s throwing her niece a bridal shower, and she told me her daughter Katie is spending another year teaching in Taiwan. It’s the usual stuff, and with our schedules we don’t get to talk on the phone that often. Without fail, though, one of us says something that cracks the other one up. We don’t mean to, but one of the hallmarks of our friendship is how dang funny we think we are. As I was signing off, I said, “I gotta go now. I’m going to go Fake Bake.”

“Fake Bake? Are you going to a tanning bed at this hour?”

“Naw, it’s a sunless thing,” and I filled her in about how I get this stuff from Kathy at the beauty shop. It’s a sunless tanning product that (get this) doesn’t rub off on your clothes when you sweat. Move over, sliced bread.

“Oh,” says Buddy Pat, “I just use the regular moisturizing lotions that have the sunless tanning stuff in them.”

“Yeah, but doesn’t it rub off on your clothes, like when your neck sweats?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just throw some on my arms and a little on my legs and don’t think about it again.”

“Okay, so what you’re telling me is that you give yourself a farmer’s tan on purpose with your Neutrogena™?”

Time marches on. Instead of being horrified at the prospect of only having tan arms and legs, we find the ease of maintaining that rather attractive. Stick with the farmers, friends. They are way ahead of the rest of us when it comes to self-esteem and common sense.

I think I will put a little bronzer on my forehead, though.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns 2006