24 | YOU Magazine
Yellow giants steal sleep from our princess TV reporter, journalist, mum and born and bred Aucklander Donna-Marie Lever on life after marrying a farmer and moving to rural Mid Canterbury. FARMY PRINCESS with DONNA-MARIE LEVER
Silence is golden. And the rural lifestyle lends itself to paddocks full of the relaxing buzz of insects, the odd moo-moo and baaaaaa mixed in with a woof from the farm dog chasing birds. It’s surprising how quickly you get use to it, in fact need it. I can barely sleep when I visit Auckland now. My family home sits near a busy motorway and it’s constantly rush-hour day and night. The city is loud, even the pedestrian crossing in the big smoke seems just that bit noisier. And back here in the country while we are no strangers to sound with our rowdy household made up of the two pre-schoolers, two canines and the farmer, I can always look forward to dusk when the babies are snuggled in their beds and the only sound echoing around is a bit of wildlife in the distance and the tick of the clock. Bliss. Well it was until last Friday. Our farmhouse sits at the very point our farm backs on to another, and Friday night at 10.40pm exactly a buzz started in the distance. Quite a nice sound, just a hypnotic hum. Maybe it was a plane? Was a truck going past? No ... it was getting louder, resembling now a series of freight trains racing each other down a shingle
road. A peek out the window revealed the silence thief in all its yellow, metal glory. Of course ... it’s harvest season! That beautiful golden sunswept view I’d been borrowing from the deck was getting the chop and it just so happened it was a loud affair. How long could it possibly go for? Twenty minutes? A few hours? Then, a slight setback, as this yellow giant turned to reveal it was equipped with headlights to roll, churn and clunk its way through the fields of gold. And just as I’m telling myself to toughen up and go to sleep, the harvester steps it up a notch. It starts beeping. Not beeping like an alarm clock, but rather like a loud car in reverse – and in stereo, with orange flashing lights now lighting up my bed-
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room like a Christmas tree. I take another peek out the window, surely it’s cut the bit by our house by now? No, it would appear not. And that’s when I realised there wasn’t one big yellow machine. But two. Great, they travel in pairs. A long and restless night followed as I tossed and turned with this new farming life discovery. It wasn’t until the morning when I was making my toast that I looked down at that crispy bread about to be plastered in Marmite and just spared a brief thought, and nodded in appreciation at the lengths gone to getting that wheat into my breakfast, and as I sunk my teeth into it aggressively, I also realised I’ve just had the last laugh for my lack of sleep, and the tastiest revenge yet!
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