So much for the idea that I’ll buy my wife a John Deere B tractor for her birthday someday. Well-heeled collectors are now driving up the prices, according to the WSJ. (“Old Tractors, Maserati Prices“) Not that it would be of much use on our little acreage.
I’ve not even used a tiller to work up our garden the last few years. Instead, I spade it by hand. I like the quiet of it — it’s quality time for thinking — and I’ve long liked doing spade work. Maybe I should have been a professional grave digger, back in the days before backhoes. My parents are visiting now, and when Dad (who is 89 years old) saw how I get the garden ready these days, he decided to do some spading himself. So the garden is getting spaded up much faster than usual, thanks to his help. And last year I probably made the garden much bigger than it needed to be. There was more corn than we knew what to do with. (I plant the corn; Myra does everything else.) It will be hard to keep from enlarging it a little more this year. I also like the idea that I’ll still be able to do this work if I get to 89 myself.
Myra was the Iowa farm girl. I was not raised on a farm myself, nor was I raised in Iowa. But I think the word “tractor” evokes the same image for both of us — a Johnny Popper — one of the later versions of the Model B, like the one towards the bottom of this page. I presume it was one of those that she drove into a center support post on her father’s new garage when she was maybe 7 years old. (I’ll have to check the details with her sometime.)
Though I don’t know how someone that young could have managed the clutch on one of those. So maybe it was something else. I remember an old Alice Chalmers with a hand clutch, which worked so smoothly a kid could handle it.