Spring Colors and Sounds
With cheerful colors finally appearing along the Vermont roadsides it is officially spring. Kubota orange, John Deere green and the the dusty rose of the occasional aging Ford or Massey Ferguson dot the hillsides with the promise of summer. We dragged all the attachments out of the barn yesterday and I took inventory of the broken and missing parts I needed to get everything to work. Lynch pins, shackles, top links and zerks -- a lovely list of alliterative parts my son and I went to fetch this morning. Soon I'll be able to york rake the road, bush hog the buckthorn, and stack the brush. I think what I like best about spring -- besides the weather and flowers if you're into that sort of thing -- is simply talking about it. A person can not say bush hog the buckthorn too many times.
posted by Tom Bodett at 11:15 AM
6 Comments:
Ahhhh, it's the little things, isn't it, Tom? Life would be good if you could answer the "How was your day?" question with "Great! I bush hogged the buckthorn this afternoon and it looks awesome!"
(I don't even know what that means)! :p
I know I should google it, but conversation is a lost art.
I followed everything except Zerks. What, praytell is a zerk?
justkj, Zerks are those little nipples you find on the moving joints of machinery where you attach a grease gun and lube the joint. Had I said "grease zerk", as I probably should have, you would have got it, but it just didn't sound right that way. This entry was all about sound, afterall.
So, owning a big honkin tractor seems to be the land equivalent of being a boat owner. The yearly replacement of increasingly hard to find replacement parts, the bloodied knuckles and introduction of a robust vocabulary of cussin passed on to sons. Wanna trade ?
I like spring for the birds and flowers, but that's just me I guess. To each his own. Not that greasing a zerk or hogging a buckthorn doesn't sound like fun...wait, where was I going with this?
Hi Tom,
This is regarding your "Quote Me" article. If you Google Allan Knight Chalmers you might find more about this amazing mentor to the late Martin Luther King.
Bill Osment
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