The little tractor that could
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
On the West Coast, I lived in the country — at least by California standards. My little town of Angwin (which had more population than Marion) was unincorporated. Houses were built on an acreage instead of a city lot and there were no such things as organized sidewalks.
Being a country girl at heart, I had horses, fruit trees, and a huge garden on my two acres. We used to say, "We're farming with a tea cup and a spoon, here — no proper tools."
Now my dad, on the other hand, lived in the real country with 18 acres and proper tools. My father so believed that a John Deere with its accompaniment of blade, disc, plow, and rototiller was so vital to maintaining the land that he tried to sell the tractor WITH the farm when it came time to move.
I'd been telling my father for years, "Don't sell that tractor, we'll need it someday in Ramona," but Dad had other ideas. That tractor was his pride and joy for many a year and no one else came very near. It was his toy!
"What would you girls do with a tractor?" he wanted to know. "You don't know the first thing about using one!" He was right, there! We didn't; but where there's a will there's a way.
When Jess and I first came to what we now refer to as the real country, we came with girl tools. We had an old battered blue suitcase filled with things we thought we needed to reclaim an old house: a heavy duty skill saw (that a friend had given to me as a joke and later discovered it was a left-handed saw — whoever heard of such a thing? We could never figure out why it felt backward.), a drill, a hammer, miscellaneous screw drivers, a tape measure, a small plane, some drill bits, a coping saw — for sure we needed that! Our teenage neighbor boy, Branden, brought us a carpenter pencil one day and said, "Now you girls have a real pencil." We laughed because we had nothing to sharpen it with since we didn't carry pocket knives. Jess used the scissors!
Such were our beginnings in the country. And then last year, when we brought our parents here to Ramona, the little John Deere tractor came, too. Tooltime Tim got the dubious job of teaching me how to use it. So far, I've stalled it several times, gotten it high centered when trying to move some millings in the driveway once, dug a hole in Tim's corral about the size of the Grand Canyon trying to learn to turn that tractor on a dime. "It's the learning curve," TTT assures me. I yearn for the day when I'm as proficient as he is on that little machine.
With all the snow this past week, we dubbed that John Deere, "The Little Tractor that Could." We had snow on the streets of Ramona — deep snow that needed to be removed and the city tractor was down for the count.
Tooltime Tim got out the little John Deere and started buzzing up and down the side streets while Jim did the main drag on his big tractor. Tim had to zip along to keep up his momentum and we laughed at the sight. We even took a video of the spectacle! Zoom, there goes that little tractor. Vrooom, there it goes again and again.
"Your dad never drove that tractor so fast," my mother commented as she saw the snow flying in the wake of "The Little Tractor that Could." While the big tractors were going down with flat tires and what-not, "The Little Tractor that Could" kept right on chugging like the Energizer Bunny until all the streets were cleared and then did it again when the next storm came.
It's another day in the country and Tim's had so much fun clearing streets that he's praying for more snow! Me, too, they cleared the streets so quickly that I had no chance to go sledding!
