On a farm in Auchtermuchty lived a loving man and wife. The husband spent his days at the plough, while his wife saw to the upkeep of the house. Day in and day out, come rain or shine, the farmer toiled in the field and never once complained about his lot, until one dreadful day.

It had rained since the early morning, and the fields were saturated. Just as he did everyday, the farmer worked the plough until evening and returned home drenched to the skin, with mud soaking through his trousers and his hands icy blocks. He was already in an unhappy mood, and the sight of his wife warm and dry and stirring a pot of soup over the stove only served to embitter him more.

“It’s unfair that you get to stay inside all day while I work in the fields every day,” said the husband. “Tomorrow, we will swap responsibilities. You will plough the fields and I will look after the house.” 

“Are you sure you would want to give me such an important job?” the wife asked, feigning reluctance. “You are, after all, so good at it.” 

“I insist. It’s about time I had a nice break,” replied her husband. 

So his wife agreed to swap jobs for the day, and informed her husband of all that needed done in a day: tending the livestock, kneading the dough, churning the butter, maintaining the hearth, looking after the goslings and keeping their young children clean. 

The husband waved a hand dismissively and said, “Yes, yes, how hard can it be?” and retired to his armchair for the evening. 

The wife spent her evening churning butter, and knowing well that her husband would try his hand at it the next day, she deliberately left buttermilk behind her instead of cream, just to challenge him. After all, he was looking forward to his break. 

At the cock’s crow, the wife rose and set out for the field to begin her day’s work while her husband enjoyed a lie in, stumbling out of bed late in the morning only to find that five of their seven goslings had been snatched up by a hungry hawk. Already off to a bad start, he scrambled to begin the other tasks set out by his wife, when some of the calves broke out of their pen and started to suckle the older cows. After running around for an hour rounding them up, he hardly had a chance to catch his breath before one of the older, grumpier cows charged him right on the rump.

The farmer, wincing from the pain, decided he ought to take it easy and do a simpler task, so he gathered up his wife’s spinning equipment and settled by the fire to spin. Settling into the rhythm, he sighed and started to relax. Now this was the easy day he had hoped for. However, as his mind started to wander to this and that, he was blithely unaware of how close he sat to the fire, and he started back to reality when he realised his hard work was singed by the flames. 

And so he moved onto the churning, but no matter how hard and long he worked, he could not seem to churn much butter at all. To make matters worse, a sow started to drink the buttermilk left behind by his wife. He drove the sow off with a stick, but in doing so accidently clobbered the two last gosling of their flock. Then, in trying to tend the hearth, the farmer tripped up and landed on the kindling, burning himself and hitting his head on the soup pot. 

He blustered with the pain and frustration, then thought to himself, ‘I will see to our bairns, how hard can that be?’ only when he picked them up, he found that they had soiled the bed. 

The farmer bemoaned his bad luck and hauled the soiled sheets to the burn where he lowered them in and began to scrub and scrub and scrub, but the current was much stronger than he realised, and they were ripped from his grasp. 

As he took off downstream chasing the bedclothes, he called for his wife. “Good wife, help! The bedclothes are being carried off downstream!” 

But in the field, behind the plough, the farmer’s wife smiled to herself and pretended not to hear. 

 When the sun at last had grown heavy in the sky and sunk down below the hills, the farmer’s wife stopped ploughing and looked over her work in the field. She was exhausted, and her soft hands were terribly dirty and blistered, but she was satisfied with a hearty day’s work completed, and so she returned to the house, excited to see how her husband had fared, and especially excited to see what he had prepared for her dinner.  

When she opened the door, she was met with chaos unlike anything she had ever seen. The children cried, the dinner was splattered across the stove, the sheets hung soaking from the ceiling, and here was a terrible burning smell in the air. 

“What happened here?” the farmer’s wife said, bracing her hands against her hips. 

On hearing his wife’s voice, the farmer leapt to his feet and hurried to the door to meet her. “Oh, wife, I’ve had a horrible day. I’ll never forsake my plough again. I’d take a year of rainy days over another moment tending to this house.”

From that day forward, the farmer was careful to treat his wife a little more graciously, and to help her where he could, for he realised that running a household was far more difficult than ploughing a field. 

From The Wife of Aucthermuchty by Anonymous