a couple of years ago I was in a funk,I wrote this story to share with some family and close friends,I thought it would be a good idea to share it while we are waiting on springtime to come to fruition.
hope you enjoy it !!
this old wrench.
I went for a walk today at the old farm where I was raised from the day I was born with the intent to find some morel mushrooms to split up between my younger brother and myself.
the crop ground is rented out to a neighbor now as the number of acres will not support the investment it would take to farm fifty five acres unless you where to have a full time job to finance it with and even then it would be for a hobby.
I drove down the old path to one of the two small fields that lay towards the eastern part of the farm,they lay north and south of each other with a small creek that separates them.
the southern field totals six acres while the northern piece totals ten acres of which eight are tillable.
As I walked along the southern fields edge to the creek to access the crossing I found an old wrench laying where the disc had dug it up and deposited it along that edge.
I wish that wrench could tell me how it got there,and when,did it fall out of a farmers pocket?,or did it bounce off of a piece of equipment as it lumbered along the field after a repair was made only to be covered up during the next pass?
knowing how poor people were back then trying to scratch out a living and to feed cattle from the meager yields of yester year,I am sure that wrench was greatly missed and lamented over for many days as well as hunted for with a great fury to find it.
It is obvious that it is very old and has laid buried in the soil for many years,I am guessing it was made back in the late thirties or early forties.
As a youngster on that farm,I dont recall ever seeing that wrench in the garage where dads old tool box was.
He did have one like it though but it had a wooden handle on it and to this day it still hangs on the nail where dad last hung it some time before he passed away in nineteen hundred ninety two,its anyones guess as to when it was used last before then.
After I picked it up,I debated about leaving it in the fork of a tree until I was ready to walk out of that field after hunting mushrooms,I decided against doing that as I am getting bad about remembering things these days and I didnt want to lose it,so I carried it in my hand for the hour I was walking up and down another creek bank that separates the north field from a little piece of timber that is land locked between the creek and the neighbors pasture to the west of it.
I was going to cross that small creek to walk that small piece of timber looking for morels but the ebb and flow of time and water made crossing it more of chore than I wanted to attempt in clean clothes this time.
After not finding any morels there I decided to walk the northern edge of the south field along the creek bank there to see if anything was waiting for me,sadly,there was not.
I decided to cross that field at an angle walking the three hundred yards back to my jeep.
A small hill that is not as steep as it once was when I was young greeted me and was it ever rocky !
I took that way to look at how many rocks there were along the way with the hope of finding another neat item lost and buried many years ago only to be exposed by time and tillage over recent years.
It always amazes me from year to year how mother earth can heave up so many rocks to show her unappreciation of having her back opened up with the tools of man to plant a crop on ground that should have most likely never seen a plow,she is trying to tell us that it should have been left to pasture.
I recall very well the many times when I was a child how after plowing and disking that field that we would pick up as many rocks as we could find and place them in the old cow path that bordered the field fence that always washed after a heavy rain and it would cut deeper yet into the earth along that old fence.
Some years were much worse than others with how many of those rocks would surface in that old field,I always believed it had something to do with how much rain we did or didnt get the previous fall and how deep the frost would go depending on that amount.
I learned from watching those fields over the years that they are continually moving ever so slowly,slow enough in fact that if you are there daily,you wouldnt notice it,but if you are away for a very long and come back,the change is drastic.
Creeks seem to meander more than they did in days past along with cutting deeper into their channels as they seek their way south to the ocean only to come back as rain to start all over again moving those fields with them.
I can tell you this is the truth as that old hill use to be a lot different than it is now as it had a small break where it crested shortly after the gateway into it and it was much steeper then too as we had to be careful when making hay in the years it was in alfalfa because you could easily upset a tractor or at the least a load of hay if you turned too short as the front of the wagon would tuck under the rack taking it off center and being then unbalanced depending on how full of a load of hay you had.
let me tell you,loading hay a second time on a hot july day was no fun,and it always seemed like a storm was just over the horizon forcing you to hurry to get it into the barn before the rain cut loose.
Up until I was a sophomore in high school,all of our hay was made with an allis chalmers rotobaler.
The bales it made were around thirty two inches long and nineteen inches in diameter weighing in at around thirty to forty pounds if the mown hay was dried properly and how tight you had the springs set on the bale chamber.
Bailing with that old rotobaler was a lot of work as you had to mow the hay and let it dry,rake the hay,bale it,then go around with a tractor and hay rack to pick those bales up off of the ground with a hay hook and stack them onto the rack.
Those bales being round presented the challenge of keeping them on the rack when headed downhill,it didnt take long to figure out you placed a couple of bales length ways to block those behind them so they wouldnt roll off.
You knew you were getting close to manhood when you could stack a sixth row on that rack from standing on the ground.
As I was standing on that hill thinking about making hay all of those years ago,many other memories of growing up on that farm came flooding back.
Dad and Mom bought that farm back in nineteen sixty to start farming along with raising four kids and livestock of all sorts,this was three years before I was born.
there were four of us kids,an older brother who was ten years older than me,a sister who was nine years older than me,myself,and a younger brother who came along two years after I did,Dad always told him that we found him under a rock herding ants,boy,that never sit well with John.
The folks did the best they could with what they had,our equipment and tractors were forty years behind in age and technology compared to every one around us back then.
I will credit my folks in that we never went hungry,we never went without clothing or shoes,and we always had a roof over our heads.( I will add,some winters we got dang cold in that old house as it was built in eighteen eighty nine with no insulation and the furnace had trouble keeping up ) and you would wake up with frost on your eyelids and nose from sleeping too close to the wall.
the oldest tractor was a nineteen thirty eight Farmall F-20 with hand brakes,the next oldest was a nineteen forty one International H.
Our newest tractor was a nineteen fifty three International M that used to belong to Dads brother Robert who sold out and moved to town.
We bought that old M from the fellow who bought it at Roberts farm auction,and of course it had a crankshaft main seal leak.
I was twelve years old when we bought that tractor,we had a fellow come out to replace that seal but the bearings were worn enough that it didnt hold either and required an overhaul.
I was born with a desire and the gift of being able to fix things,I told Dad if he bought me an overhaul manual that I could overhaul that engine which I did and we used that tractor almost daily for farming and running the buzz saw for many years after that.
I ended up fixing everything on that farm including overhauling the H and doing a vavle job on the F-20,my younger brother owns these tractors now and we still play with them when the opportunity arises.
Our other equipment was,an old two bottom trip plow,an eight foot tandem gang disc,a ten foot harrow,a john deere number five manure spreader,an old model twenty four mounted sickle mower,a five bar international rake,a farmers friend straight armed trip bucket loader,and,a new idea model three hundred two row pull type corn picker.
That picker was dragged out of a salvage pile and brought home in need of many repairs.
The local dealer let us take parts off of a couple that they had in junk row,this is where I learned to not break bolts without the aid of a torch to heat with,let me tell you,that is an art in itself,and it takes a lot of time.
To this day,I have never figured out how my labor was cheaper than just buying a new bolt when needed,but I am grateful for everything I learned there.
to this day,I would bet I could fix that old picker from one end to the other in my sleep,I knew that thing inside and out.
As I was standing on that hill remembering things like the sound of that old corn picker with the whirring of its many chains and gears along with the whine of the blower that blew the husks out of the husking bed where they were stripped off of ears on their way to the elevator and into the wagon.
I could also hear the harmony of each cylinder firing in that old tractors engine as it powered not only itself but the picker behind it and the wagon it towed.
When that wagon was full of freshly picked ear corn,you hooked up to another wagon while someone pulled the full one up to the crib to dump it into the hungry elevator that carried it up to the opening where it fell onto the cribs floor slowly filling wagon by wagon.
I could hear the chatter of the mowers sickle as it rocketed back and forth between the guards and knives while the seven foot bar they rode in slid along the ground cutting away at the hays stems laying it perfectly flat behind it,oh the smell of newly mown hay!!
I could hear the whiff whiff whiff of the five bar rake we had as it picked the dried hay off of the ground and put it into long rolled rows waiting for the baler to come and bale it up.
That brings on also the memory of the baler as it was running,for a machine with many moving parts it was fairly quiet but you could hear the rattle chain as it climbed endlessly up the apron taking the raked hay with it feeding it into the belts where the bale was formed until the chamber was full.
After many hours of baling hay,you were still brought to full attention when the twine arm would drop with a loud thump you could hear over the tractors exhaust at which time you stopped the tractor to let the twine feed across the bale and up against the twine knife cutting the twine,at this moment the chamber would open up dumping the newly formed bale out the back of the baler.
once you heard it close back up,you continued until the twine arm dropped again.
When the hay was heavy from timely rains,you would swear that you were never going to see the other side of the field in your lifetime because the baler would fill much more often making you stop that much more frequently.
Under a hot summer sun when there were days with no breeze,baling hay was hard work,especially when you were stacking it in a hot barn,at least on a moving tractor,you kind of created your own breeze and it was much appreciated.
When I went up to that farm today to hunt mushrooms for John and I,I was in a funk as things have been kind of tough lately and I was feeling sorry about the situation we are in here at home.
I had many things on my mind and was happy to be away from the house and to get to watch my german short hair gracie run and play on her most favorite place in the world sniffing everything her old nose could find to sniff.
While standing on that old hill thinking about how hard everyone worked in those days gone by and what it took to bring a crop in on time and hope that you had enough to get by on until the next year.
It dawned on me that in all of those years,the Good Lord never failed to see we had just enough to do so.
That realization reminded me that He is still doing that very thing for me this very day.
I use to hate that farm and all of the hard work it took to make it work on a daily basis and I couldnt wait to run from it once I got out on my own.
But it dawned on me today that I take that old farm wherever I go with me everyday as everything I learned from it has provided a good living for me all of these years,you know what?? that old farm is still providing to this day.
Carrying that old wrench for an hour triggered all of these thoughts and memories as it made me wonder who fixed how many things with it while they had it in their hands before it was lost.
Maybe,just maybe,it was lost only to be found by me today to remind me of where I came from,what I have learned,where I am going,and how to appreciate all of the things I have,seen,done,and lived through.
Maybe its not just an old wrench after all.
Thank you Mom and Dad,and thank you especially our Heavenly Father for always providing without fail.
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