Merry Post Christmas!
Another Christmas over: Church services, presents, family visits. Done. But before you head out to the mall to begin the Great Exchange, go ahead and admit it. There’s something you wanted for Christmas – and you didn’t get it.
Lean in close and whisper your secret desire.
I’ll go first. I wanted a tractor. Not a toy, the real deal. The kind that until this past year I figured existed only in Kenny Chesney songs (She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy) and square states in the middle of the country.
Maybe I should explain – we bought land in the mountains this spring. All around us, guys grow hay to feed their horses or for export to Japan. The former owner of our land’s failure to take care of his property… well, let’s just say it was a sore point in the valley.
Summer rolled around and the grass started growing, as grass does, but the weeds were getting there faster. So I fired up the Forrest Gump machine. Y’all have seen Forrest Gump one of the nine million times it’s been on TV, right? In case you missed it, this is the mower Forrest used:
It took hours to cut that field.
And I’m sure you noticed there’s no padding on that seat.
Fast forward a few weeks and the grass – and weeds – have done their thing. I looked at Forrest Gump, sighed and fired it up. I’d made about two laps when my neighbor drove into the field on his enormous John Deere. “Cathy, let me teach you how to drive a tractor.”
That sucker had lots of bells and whistles, buttons, knobs and levers, but it also had a huge mowing deck and the field looked pristine in no time flat.
And so it went all summer. I’d fire up Forrest Gump, clear the edges and cut around the irrigation heads and my neighbor would show up with his tractor.
Granted this wasn’t like borrowing a cup of sugar and I lived in fear of somehow breaking it, but I loved that tractor.
When the holiday season rolled around, I asked Santa for a tractor.
Left homemade cookies and everything.
Our family celebrated Christmas at the new cabin (yeah, yeah, another story) and when all the packages were open, there wasn’t one with a set of keys. I checked the barn, the garage, the shed.
No tractor.
Kinda like the pony when I was a kid.
Hmmm … I wonder if the dealer puts tractors on sale after Christmas?
So what did you wish for – either this year or when you were a kid – that Santa didn’t tuck under your tree?
I origianally posted this on our group website – Didn’t Get A Tractor For Christmas
