She Wanted to Drive My Tractor

Gwen opened the box, pulled out a big manila envelope, and looked at me questioningly. I took the envelope, opened it, and saw a stack of papers inside. When I took the papers out, the one on top said "Contract For Deed".

I looked at Dad and he grinned.

"While you were working the crops, I did some checking with a lawyer about what to do with the farm. What he suggested is what you have there. It's a contract to buy me out. I had the farm appraised and the land was valued at a little over three hundred thousand and the equipment about another hundred.

"What the contract says is that you'll pay me forty-five thousand every year for the next ten years. I figure that's about three fourths what you can clear on the crops, but since I'm financing it, you won't have to pay interest to a bank. If Gwen keeps working at the elevator, you'll do as good as your mother and I did when we started out. Your mother wants to take care of the baby when Gwen's ready to go back to work, so you won't have to worry about that. All you have to do is sign the contract and the farm will essentially be yours. After ten years it will be, free and clear."

Gwen had tears in her eyes when she jumped up and hugged Dad. I didn't hug him, but I had a few tears too. I hugged Mom instead.

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Dad and Mom used some of their savings to buy a house in town that spring and Gwen and I moved to the farm. When Bobby was born, Mom helped Gwen for a month, and then drove out to the farm every day to take care of him while Gwen was at work.

Life was great, but things don't always go according to plan. I had a bad year and couldn't make the entire payment, so it took Gwen and I eleven years and two more kids before I got the deed to the farm. Dad was happy to be retired, though he didn't really retire. He came out with Mom every day, sometimes to help if there was fieldwork or equipment repairs to be done, but usually just to play with Bobby. They did the same thing with Blake and Judy.

After we made the last payment, Gwen kept working. For another fifteen years, we basically lived on her salary and used the profits on the farm to buy the rest of the section where the farm was located. My boys and I are legal partners now and we farm six hundred and forty acres. They both have degrees in agriculture from the U of I, and what they learned has changed things on my farm a lot.

Judy's a software engineer now, but she always had a thing for Danny Roane, a farm kid she went to school with. He gave her a ring last week, and now she's figuring out how she can engineer software from home since she'll be moving back once they're married. Danny is in the process of buying his dad's farm, so she'll have to work for quite a while. She told Gwen she didn't mind since she knew that's how we started out.

We don't do things like I did back then, but that's good in some ways. My two old tractors have been replaced by two John Deere 7310R's. We don't plow, we use a field cultivator that works as much land in a morning as I used to plow in a day. Everything else has gotten bigger too. My old ten-foot disk is sitting in the shed. We now use a twenty-foot disk to cut down the crop trash before planting, and we plant twelve rows at a pass instead of my old four.

That increases the yield and saves time and money. That increased yield and doing some custom cutting and picking allowed us to purchase a new Gleaner S88 combine with a twenty foot grain head and a six row corn head. Everything is computer controlled and monitored and we keep track of the yield of each acre via a GPS unit that logs field position and grain yield. When we fertilize the next year, we use those numbers to figure out how much to apply to each acre.

Our yields have gone up by about forty percent over the years, and that's good. I do still miss the old days sometimes though. Driving one of the 7310's or the Gleaner is more like sitting in a luxury car than a tractor or combine. They have air-ride seats, stereo radio, and air conditioning. I think it was nicer when the tractor seat was in the open air and you could hear the engine pulling hard and smell the freshly turned soil or the smell of ripe soybeans and corn. It was nice having Gwen sitting there on the fender beside me too.

I still have one of those first tractors, an old Allis WD-45. Maybe this afternoon, I'll fire it up and hook up to that old disk. There's a patch next to the house that we use as a garden plot and Gwen wants to get it ready. She'll come out with me and sit on the fender while I make a couple passes to bury the trash and level it out. After that, well Bobby and Blake won't be back until dark, so we'll have the rest of the afternoon to ourselves.

This morning at breakfast, Gwen kissed me until I had to breathe and then said she hoped I wouldn't be working all day. I know what she wants and I'm more than happy to give it to her. As the old song goes, I'm not as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was.