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Responding to my friend Al L. in Wisc. Today is May 23, the second anniversary of my dad's death. He was 93, was born and raised and worked on the family farm in Ashton, Wisc., all his life. All he ever owned was Farmalls. Tonight I will go to the Ashton St. Peter cemetery and say "hi" to pops and his lovely bride Sally, or as I call her, mother. Al L. predicts I will be greeted by soothing winds and the smells of spring flowers, newly tilled soil and freshly mowed hay. I told Al L. you can toss in a little "dairy air," if you know what I mean! Then I'll drive the half mile to our farm and head out to the little hill that overlooks the valley and the woods. Take along a bottle of wine. Make a toast to dad and all my ancestors. Thank them for working so hard and making all this possible. Then I'm sure I'll visualize dad and me picking up stones together when I was a kid. That was a common late-May chore for us. We would use the manure spreader to collect the stones once the corn started popping up through the ground. It was on one of those stone-picking expeditions that I realized how amazing he was. We had just pulled up to the rock pile to unload. I was probably 10 years old and standing in the manure spreader, picking up the smaller stones and tossing them out by the fistfulls. Dad was standing next to the spreader, reaching down for the bigger ones, when one of the stones I tossed hit him above his right eye. He never looked at me. He just stood there for a second. Shook his head. Didn't even rub the spot. Just shook his head. Then he reached down for some more rocks and we continued to unload. He never said a word. I never said anything and certainly never brought it up again. But I think about that time often. Yep, my thoughts are with my dad today. As for what is my favorite Farmall? We had an H, an M, a 460 and a 706 over the years. The H was small and intimate and was the one I learned on when I was called on to be the driver of our hay wagon at age 6. Yes, age 6. I drove the H to pull the wagon as my older sisters and brothers stood on top and dad picked the bales off the ground and tossed them up. My job was to drive slowly and carefully to the next bale so dad didn't have so far to walk. When we started a load, I could chug along slowly for some time, weaving through the bales, without stopping. But when the load got bigger, I would have to stop at almost every bale to give dad and my siblings enough time to toss, catch and stack it. I can still remember the terrible fear, yet incredible pride, I felt when I would stop on a hill (the hills looked like mountains to me then) and smoothly start up again when I got the "okay" to move on to the next bale. I can't think of a better way to grow up! So, I liked all the Farmalls we had, but that H, the one that nursed me along at age 6, has to be my favorite.
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