Bringing Home Blue

My Loving Spouse looked at me last night and said,……

“Can you believe it??  We are a two tractor family!”

Yes, it is true.  Although my love for Jubal remains strong, a tractor even older than I am does have a few draw backs…so began the hunt for a ‘small’, ‘cheap’ tractor with a loader.  (L-O-A-D-E-R, as in very exciting to my men, jury out for me).  Blue is another Ford, but decades younger than Jubal at only about 30 years old.  Blue is pretty fancy, having a key to turn it on and a seat not made out of metal.

The loader I am told is going to really come in handy.  All I can think of right now however is that having that big old piece of metal at the front of the tractor where I cannot see it, could possibly make it easier to run into more stuff.  As far as the loader goes, having heard more than one man say, “Oh, that is good, it has orchard tires on it, which keeps it low to the ground, that’ll make it less likely to tip over”.  Uhmmmm, tip over?  Seriously? 

Blue does have a fancy steering turning ball thing, which I have already used and if you have or need one of these then you have a tractor that came complete with a very special word called ‘power steering’.  I’m sure some of my previous tractor-running-into-stuff driving might never have happened had I had ‘power steering’!

We got Blue home just as the sun was setting, preparing to take him off the trailer between our two barns.  Everything went as it normally does, Blue wouldn’t start.  (Bad British Word)  Did I mention it was cold…at least below freezing…and now dark.  My Loving Spouse and I managed to jump-start the tractor and get it off of the trailer without breaking anything.  We were trying to attach the blade so I could run it as soon as I got home from work, but of course we didn’t have all the pins and clips it should have come with…no worries, we had some…somewhere in the workshop.  It was then that our neighbor the Fire Captain showed up.  He had his flashlight out and was inspecting Blue.

“Oh, did he call you to come help?”, I asked.

“No, we just got home and I could hear the tractor running, so I knew you’d gotten a new one and had to come and check it out”.  I love farm men…they hear (literally) a ‘new’ tractor was in the neighborhood and had to explore, they are our closest neighbors, but…it is still not all that close.   I got to go inside and thaw out and My Loving Spouse had another male around to enjoy the wonders of big metal pieces of machinery, figuring out why it wouldn’t start (darn safety features) and The Fire Captain says that he really ‘likes it’ and it is ‘good, being so low, so it will be harder to tip over‘.