Rain or shine.

Heat makes the ground bend when you’re 6 and studying the way the July sun makes the corn stalks splinter. 

Hunger is hunger whether you’re 7 or 29. I learned from a very young age that food doesn’t come from the grocery store. You need money to bring it home, but it isn’t made there. Bonfires warm up cans of beans if you can balance them on a pitchfork over the flames. 

A cow can survive tumbling out of an unchained trailer door down a backroad hill, and still become a cheeseburger. We just had to keep it alive long enough to make it to the slaughterhouse. Combine fires are the sun in the middle of a wheat field orbit, and the flames melting orange cream into stalks of gold would be beautiful if your uncle wasn’t driving. When you’re pulling a chisel plow in a muddy field you have to lift the plow a tad in the muddy parts otherwise you’ll get stuck; when you call grandma she’ll panic and pace around the house until you call to tell her you learned the trick.  ... From the cab of the tractor all eight of the 6 foot tires spun uselessly, caked to the tips of the treads with mud. I was half way through the 287th loop in the field beside the farm house, aka grandma and grandpa’s house, with black smoke churning from the exhaust pipe in the center of the IH red, long-nose, hood of the tractor. 

The soil is mostly clay on our farm by Lake Erie. If you’ve ever taken a pottery class you know the slick of wet clay in your hands. I may as well have sprayed the bottom of each tire with industrial non-stick spray and climbed on the metal sled behind Clark Griswald. 

Except this wasn’t the Christmas movie my husband and I watch while drinking Christmas Ale and desperately wrapping a living room full of presents at 1am on Christmas Eve. This was “several hundred, thousand dollars worth of machinery becoming compromised, and a sizeable portion of tillable acres being rutted and the topsoil compromised beneath me.” I yanked the throttle down from where gramps had drawn a rabbit on the dash at the top, toward the hand drawn turtle at the bottom, pushed in the clutch, and dropped the engine into low, while easing the throttle back toward the rabbit, and praying I’d ease forward. Black, black smoke chugged from the exhaust. The side by side tires ground down into the earth like a mule planting its feet. “Shit.” I hit the top of the steering wheel with my right hand. Sorry, God. I knew swearing was bad, but if no one was around to hear it, was it still a sin? Please, please just let me get this thing out and I’ll never swear again. I took a deep breath, hoping God was able to peer down at me for a moment and harden the earth below me so I could move forward. I decided to try second gear low instead of first low. I dropped the throttle again to ease the clutch into the higher gear, and slowly tapped the throttle closer to the rabbit with my palm. The engine churned louder with each budge north. This is it. Okay, this is going to be fine. I tried to reassure myself. I gave the throttle one last bump while releasing the clutch with my left boot. 

The tractor threw itself against the plow. I rocked forward in my seat, and yelled encouragement into the roar of the engine. 

But only coal black puffs rippled out of the exhaust pipe in expanding mounds. The engine screamed, and I backed off the throttle in defeat. I pushed in the clutch, relieved the throttle, and shifted down into neutral. I was in the biggest tractor on our farm. There wasn’t any other machine that could pull me out. I imagined the ground opening up to swallow me, the tractor, and the plow whole and sinking down into a deep, clay filled pit of failure. I had to call the farm even though I knew no one was there to answer beside grandma, and the image of her bouncing back through the field in her chrysler with chains and hooks to pull me free was ludicrous. She agreed that all she could do was try to get ahold of grandpa. I’d just sit here in my shame until someone could come help. I was too far from the woods for a winch. There wasn’t one on the front of this tractor, anyway. I doubted that anyone had ever gotten stuck in it to the extent that they needed one and hoped I wouldn’t be shunned from the farm. 

I put my forehead against the steering wheel. Pulling gramps away from the planter now meant the field he was working in wouldn’t be done before dark, meaning the field he needed to get to in the morning wouldn’t get got to until tomorrow afternoon, and so on and so forth, and it’s a constant race against the rain. Every minute, every acre counts. It was starting to get hot in the cab with no breeze coming in. I decided I might as well wait for the Calvalry out in the field. I pulled up on the hydraulic lever that releases the plow, lifts, and folds it to store in the toolshed or for when it’s being transported down the road. The plow lifted easily from where it had been plunged, dragging through the wet, heavy earth and pulling hard against the tractor. When it reached fully lifted status, and balanced up on the tires, the whole machine surged forward a tad forward. I decided to try again. I felt lighter in my seat. I hadn’t even thought to try releasing the weight of the plow from behind the tractor. I shifted down into first low, the plow fully raised this time, and tapped the throttle back toward the bunny with the plow now lifted behind me. I moved forward as if I’d never been stuck.