Tractor Joy

I don't know if it was just that I fell for the marketing hype, or the influence of certain relatives, but I used to fancy myself a John Deere man. I mean woman. Then something changed.

 

It might have been the faded red of our little International that started to interfere with my opinion, or the fact that the first 'real' (read 'over 40 horsepower') tractor that I was allowed to drive was our neighbors' red Massey-Ferguson, but when I started thinking about having a 'real' tractor for the farm, it was getting harder to envision anything but red.

 

Anyway, for a while now, my mom had been kicking around the idea of buying a tractor for family use. Off and on we would go look at tractors or scan online ads for something. Mom's cousin came earlier in the summer and took her tractor shopping, but nothing seemed quite right. And then I saw one on craigslist: a Massey-Ferguson 253 with a front-end loader and canopy.

 

We consulted our neighbor, and he didn't seem so sure, so I put it out of my mind for a while, but when it was still there a few weeks later, I asked mom what she thought. She told me to have Chris call. He didn't get an answer, and no one ever called him back, but I couldn't let it go. He tried again a week later, and finally we got a chance to go see it. We took our neighbor along, and with his stamp of approval, my mom bought it and named it "The Nicholas Dandy" after her grandfather.

 

If you know me well, you can image that I was (and still am) pretty excited. For a few nights, it was hard for me to sleep, daydreaming about all the wonderful things we could do with Dandy. But Mom got first dibs and spent a couple of day bush-hogging the family's 14 acres.

Next, we used Dandy to put some dirt around the foundation of the new house.

This week, Dandy rested in the stable, allowing some hens to lay some eggs in his bucket the day they got locked out of the coop. And tomorrow, he and I will finally get to spend some time together cutting the front pasture.