You know you’re on a farm when your parents give you a pocketknife and, months later, you still carry it around every day.

In the past, I would occasionally have a Daniel Boone attack and buy (or find around the house) a cheap rip-off of a Handy Dandy Swiss Army Knife. For two or three days, it would bang around in my pocket, reminding me as I sat at my desk that if ever a hurricane struck, the roof blew off, and I had to slit out the cubicle cloth to make a lean-to, I’d be ready. (Whatever a lean-to is.) And yet all too soon, the knife would drop from my morning Pocket Filling Ritual, leaving me complacent and defenseless.

These days, though, a day without a knife is like a cubicle without an outlet. I still can’t hang onto a Gadget-Packed Wonder, but I do always have my serrated Big Bad Blade. The thing just asks to be plunged into the rib cage of a bear. I never answer it. But, I do use it for many lesser tasks, such as:

• Cut the twine on bales of hay or straw
• Cut any other twine, actually, such as the tomato trellis twine I’ll go back to after this blog
• Hack off the small branches that overhang the path to our cabin
• Defend my wife and daughter from marauding wolves
• Cut nasty old plastic into the right shape to cover mushroom logs (that is, logs on which mushrooms grow)
• Practice flicking the blade out like a true farmer-gangster
• Pretend to whittle
• Slice lunch, if I’ve forgotten about the nasty plastic
• Open packages that are encased in that special kind of hard, seemingly thin plastic that is impervious to the human finger
• Cut myself (by accident)
• Harvest salad mix, head lettuce, or anything other produce you cut
• Just kidding about the wolves
• Cut electric fencing when the horses need to get past it (an infrequent job, but exciting)

I’ll think of ten more after I finish, but you get the idea. Knives are good. For a pocket companion, I recommend the kind that fold up rather than a breadknife or butcher cleaver, but that’s the voice of eager youth rather than experience. Now I need to go use mine. Or take a siesta.