Website of the day: Wil Wheaton dot net. Yes, that Wil Wheaton ~
Westley Crusher himself.
My god ~ I can't believe it's been a month since I took fingers to keyboard in this journal. (Why am I constantly surprised at that?) I'll be honest ~ I took time away because I felt that things were getting a bit too serious and frankly, I was tired of it.
I have had some great fun during the time I was away. My dad finally let me help him on the farm the past two Thursdays and this past Wednesday. (How long has it been since he first asked? Can time really be measured in such lengths?) I was the hay raker and I drove the coolest tractor ~ a 1950 John Deere. (I orginally wrote 'Jophn'. I suppose the 'p' is silent.) Huge thing, it is and I love it. We had to change the spark plugs every two hours or so because the carb needs retooling but hey...it added to the charm. Hehehehehe. I think I would seriously love to rebuild it and see how it was put together. I wonder if I could find the specs on it, just out of curiosity?
They just don't make them like that any more.
The real fun was dodging all the sinkholes. Since the front tires on the John Deere are situated side by side in front and not on opposite sides of the tractor like modern ones, it sometimes got interesting...like the time I missed a sinkhole just big enough for the front tires to fit into by about an inch ~ two at the most. I just didn't see it until the tires had passed it.
I'm still wondering if I may have faced certain death and didn't even know it. On the last day of baling (a truly horrid day for me ~ but I'm getting to that part.), I was trying to rake the field from hell. Rocks; briars taller than the tractor tires, wet weather springs just large enough to jolt you if you hit them and sinkholes. Big sinkholes. Granted, they were nothing like what you see on the news from Florida where whole houses get swallowed up but certainly large enough for a tractor to go into. Before I even started, my dad says, "Watch out for the sinkhole with the walnut tree in it. There is another sinkhole somewhere in that field but I don't know where ~ I know I didn't find it when I was mowing in there."
Truer words have never been spoken ~ because I found the damn thing and didn't even know it.
All I know is that I was going along and suddenly the rake stops turning. I'm pulling a giant dead weight. This is after I jarred the rake off the tractor by taking too sharp of a turn and...something else. What was it? Oh yeah...I was driving the Ford because the John Deere's battery went dead, among other things. I kept wondering if I was going to be able to stay on the Ford because the seat kept sliding around ~ one minute I'm nearly standing on the brakes because the seat is way forward and suddenly I think I'm going off the back end. Anyway, getting back to the story...
I pull the rake over to where my dad is oiling the baler so he can fix it and he says, "Why don't you let me drive this thing awhile?" No problem there ~ it's been just one thing after another for me. He comes back (after finishing the field ~ I thought I was going to go to sleep.) and tells me that I had found the sinkhole that he dropped the tractor into last year ~ the tractor missed it, again by inches, and one of the tires of the rake when in.
Now, the interesting part of this long narrative is this ~ when my dad got caught in it last year, he drove straight into it and it 'swallowed' the front half of the Ford tractor. The tires are over 4 feet apart, folks. If I had hit it, I would have come into at an angle and the tractor would have more than likely flipped over onto me.
Thing is ~ I still don't know where exactly the damn thing is.
Why does everything I do end up sounding like an analogy of life?
Page Copyright 2001 D. Firewolf
