Old Tractors!

I learned how to do something new today! How to drive an old tractor. For awhile now, we've been working on what is supposed to eventually be a Parelli Play Field. Where like-mind Parelli folks like myself, can come and play with their horses.

So today I went out and helped Rich work on it. He showed me how to operate the old tractor. I've moved the back hoe around the place, and I love driving the Gator out to feed the horses, but the old tractor was a first for me.

While I was driving back and forth across the field, I was thinking about how I would write about my experience of driving an old tractor. (People who love to write are always thinking of how they would write about their experiences and that's what I do too.)

Of course, tons of books and lots of songs have already been written about old tractors, and now I understand why! There is just something about sitting on an old smelly tractor slowly working your way across a field pulling a disk plow. Plow disk? I'm not sure what it's called. But you look out at the field you haven't plowed yet and you get this daunting feeling of "this is going to take all friggin' day! Then you look back at what you done, and you get this instant gratification of "Look what I've done!" It kinda goes back and forth. Daunting feeling. Gratification. Daunting, gratified. Back and forth. Until you're nearly done, and then it's WOW! I'm nearly done! I cannot imagine how they plowed huge fields up in the olden days with a horse like Forrest.

I started out jamming the gears and getting stuck too close to the fence and having to back up all weird and messing up my rows. But by the time I was three quarter's of the way done with the field, I was still jamming gears and ...no I was getting a little better at keeping her going. See I called it a "her." That means I'm a real "old tractor person" now. It is old and I am old. We're both old.

Seriously, there is just something about driving an old tractor. I've heard it said that old tractors are like women, very temperamental. You have to know how to treat them to get along with them. I don't think so. I think old tractors are more like horses. If you don't handle them correctly, they buck, snort, fart, rear up on the two hind tires. They stop dead in their tracks and you have to find a way to start them again. A tractor with a plow disk thingy on the back of it is a bugger to turn around without getting hooked up on stuff like the fence and they will tear stuff up you don't want torn up. Yep, they are just like horses.

The picture of the rock wall is what Rich did today while I was the plowin' the field, and that's May the dog, taking a dip in the fishpond! Yep! We're hicks!