“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”
– Dwight David Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States (1890-1969)
Highway 71, just west of Austin Bergstrom Airport, is slow going. Tonight, I was stopped for about 6 minutes, down wind from some heavy equipment that was working to widen the road and relieve the congestion. The diesel exhaust wafted across my open sunroof, and I caught a whiff.
It was dark. It was breezy. It was warm.
The smell of the diesel exhaust took me back to 1981 — late at night, our Massey Ferguson chugging through an evening very much like this one. Dad was asleep, and I’d come home from college and decided to surprise him by getting some field work done. I coasted the tractor out of the machine shed, dropped the clutch when I was far enough away from the house that I wouldn’t wake him up, and spent the next three hours plowing the fertile creek bottom ground — partly so he wouldn’t have to the next day, and partly because I needed the therapy.
I needed the quiet — even with the diesel engine working hard — the relative quiet of a simple task, done well, and the peace that comes from doing it. Dad was most at peace feeding the calves and working the soil. That kind of peace is important, and these days, harder to come by.
In white collar gigs, finding that sense of peace and quiet can be an elusive pursuit. We might need to let our senses kick in — the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and memories of simpler times.
It’s easy to make our work too complex. It can be difficult to make it simple. But, when we get it right – – the simplicity makes a difference.
There was a time when I’d have been annoyed at the delay, sitting there on Highway 71, west of Austin Bergstrom Airport. Tonight, though, it was ok. It set me up for a better day tomorrow. It brought me closer, for a moment, to my dad — gone too long, but still teaching me lessons all these years later.
Tom Gelin says
Steve,
This post is right up there with “the porter”.
I was right there with you, getting on the tractor, excited to please “dad” with not only the effort, but more the thoughtfulness. Demonstrating that some of the lead-by-example and those choice pieces of advice he’d provided along the way that he’d hoped would sink in, had actually sunk.
Then, not to say anything about it even though it was a big deal to you both.
That’s a great memory.
T