I saw a beautiful cardinal this morning while I was looking out the kitchen window at the pasture. It landed on the windowsill and just sat there, looking right at me. Seeing a cardinal is allegedly a sign that a loved one lost is close by watching us. It was serendipitous, as Amy and I were just talking about this a couple of days ago while out for a walk.
Daddy has been gone a little over four months and I still think of him constantly. He’s there in everything I do. It’s gardening season and I’ve been running the BCS walk-behind tractor several times a week. I bought it a few years ago and Daddy was fascinated with it and all the tasks that it could perform. He lamented that he wished we had it when he was younger and still physically able to work around the property. It would’ve been perfect for him, as we only had four acres and most of it was “as steep as a horse’s face” as he phrased it. The BCS not only tills and breaks new ground, but has dozens of other implements, from a log splitter to a bush-hog that will cut hillsides that no traditional tractor can safely mow.
We never had fancy stuff like that. What Daddy did have was ingenuity. When I was maybe three or four years old, he made a tractor of sorts. Our farm machinery consisted of some type of worn out Troy Bilt or Bradley tiller and a push plow that came with his daddy’s farm and it is now almost a hundred years old. I still use the push plow to this day. Unfortunately we never had anything to break ground with. We did that with mattocks and shovels. The shovels even usually had homemade handles, as we were too poor (or Daddy was too cheap) to buy store-bought hickory replacement handles. I don’t know where he came up with the scheme to weld up this Franken-tractor, but it was pretty neat. What is left of it still sits off in the woods near the garden. He narrowed some type of rear differential and put two old Model A transmissions in line to act as some means of gear reduction. It had mud-tread truck tires and an old cast-off metal seat from my grandad’s old Ford 8N. He traded some moonshine for an old turning plow and welded up some homemade cultivators. The thing actually sort of worked and we used it sporadically for many years until he bought a second-hand International Cub Cadet from Harrison Waters’ dad.
We planted the first of two gardens today. It went well and the ground looked perfect. We used my BCS for tilling, but it sure would have been more fun riding the old homemade tractor while Daddy stood by supervising us…