He's Still The One

Jon showed Benjamin how to grease the spader -- a long process because there are so many grease fittings and mysterious places to fill with gear oil. It took a couple of hours, including repairing the power washer first. So off I went on my nicely greased spader. The timing was important because there was rain predicted this afternoon and I had just spread fertilizer on the fields yesterday. We have to get the fertilizer turned under before the rain or it will wash away -- not good for the waterways or the soil.

After three successful passes, I looked behind me and saw that something was wrong. The spader was askew, not attached at one point. I have seen this before. Not often, but when it happens, it takes some muscles and some brains to get things lined up again because a spader is a big, heavy piece of equipment. You can't just lift it up and push it back into alignment. I looked at it carefully to be sure I could describe it correctly and I walked away.

I knew that this might be trouble. There was no one on the farm to help me. I might have bent something. We might not have the right size pin to reattach the implement to the tractor.

I went home and had lunch and waited for Jon to wake up from his nap (he thought he was done for the day, after being outside for those hours, for the first time in a very long time). I told him I needed help and described the situation.

We went to look at the tractor, then we went in search of the right pin, then we got a digging bar and a chain. Jon wanted to use the loader to lift the spader. This made sense except that there were only two of us and I didn't see how we would coordinate all of that, with just us. One of us had to be able to see the place that needed to line up and also direct the person with the loader. The person on the loader couldn't see anything but needed to be able to do exactly what was asked. I wanted to see if we could do it just by getting things lined up a little at a time.

But then we ran into Carrie who was in between things and we snagged her. She got the loader, I was on the tractor, and Jon directed traffic. He decided where to attach the chain, he signaled Carrie, he told me when to lift the arms, when to drive a little bit forward. I got off the tractor and crawled under to put the pin in its place after it was all lined up. That was not a job for Jon.

And it was fixed. No one got hurt and no equipment got broken. I got back on the tractor and finished spading all the patches, incorporating all the fertilizer. 

If Stephen had been home, he could have helped, but Jon was exactly the person I needed. He gets impatient with me when I fret about him standing between two big pieces of equipment, not worrying that one of us is going to accidentally run him over. But this is the sort of thing that Jon and I have been doing together for 45 years now and I am so glad he is still able to be my rescue engineer. He is still the one.


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