Tractor Thoughts
Sitting on the bouncing and unevenly sprung cushion of one of the family tractors today, I realized that for the longest time, I thought Ohio was unaffected by the pandemic. A foolish thought, and one I did not believe in my brain; but I believed it in my heart. Most of the years since college, to return to the family farm is reliably a return to snug, earlier periods. The place’s only real flaws as a functioning time machine were that folks got older and each return I saw that Columbus had thrown up another few acres of over-developed strip malls and suburbs. Not so, this year; the commotion of the headlines vividly effect Mount Vernon, Howard and Gambier. A word which would have sounded like cold, scientific “acronyism” (what I call forcing acronyms to do work in sentences that you should do) is now on every sign, menu and business door, not to mention everyone’s lips: COVID, the hard second syllable all too vivid, livid. Gone, it seems, is what my heart always craves after a few months away from the old dominion: an escape into the ploughed fields and gently growing trees.
This year’s Thanksgiving stands out like an odd artifact, a dreamy segue from reality. But it is there, distinctly in the short-term memory, being copied into the long-term archives. In Virginia, COVID tests were administered and found negative. Emboldened, we set forth on the empty interstates. The scales did not fall from the world upon crossing the Ohio River. COVID still existed; parking lots were still vacant, masks were still worn most everywhere. I’ve visited three times this side of March, but this time for some reason it hit home; home could be hit. That evening and the next day, the few immediate family members we had hoped to see back up in Ohio decided, for various reasons unique to 2020, to not come, and a carefully orchestrated dinner of less than ten (per Governor Mike Dewine, who was not invited) became four.
The ritual of feastmaking still reigned on Thursday, though no Macy’s Day parade droned from the living room, providing the emotional comfort food of Al Roker reciting the usual factoids about a gasbag Big Bird. I like the Macy’s Day parade; except for the musical numbers which capture vividly the state of our cultural decline, the scenes could be from any year in recent memory, your childhood or mine. Much like Ohio. But this year…
Speaking of big birds, this year’s turkey was divine. A new technique, this Thanksgiving: an apple cider vinegar brine bath, the acid of which combines with your herb butter spread to make for a heavenly roast and a richly piquant skin. As usual, I was tasked with being culinarily intimate with the bird; for some reason, raw meat is not offputting to me, nor has it ever been despite a squeamishness in biology class. Purely scientific interest in a body is as repulsive as platonic love; but tell me this noble bird died for merrymaking and I treat it with something approaching friendship.
The dishes found themselves distributed into containers and sacks, and these we brought to the edge of our driveway, where aforementioned family members picked them up. This exchange as lawful citizens felt like one of drug lords, and added a sad romance to the scene that all respectable crime probably has (I have only committed unrespectable crimes, so I would not know). But then we retreated to our diminished table and felt the old warmth of family; lesser in magnitude but still the same flame.
I’ve never been keen on Black Friday bargain hunting, and it sounds like if anything good came of 2020 it was maybe breaking America of this nauseating consumerist orgy. For me, the day was spent culling the forest of a few toppled trees with one of our old irons, as enthusiasts call two-cylinder tractors. Their tricycle design allows you to squaredance around stumps and trees, and a skilled pilot can stand up on the platform and really showboat his way around the woods, not breaking a twig. I daydream of a world where you could get paid as much to carefully timber as Amazon engineers do to eliminate whatever inconveniences stand between the firm and Jeff Bezo’s complete lordship of the earth; the work is hard, but more importantly it is immediately satisfying and of unquestionable value. Unlike software, there is little skill required to start; but you must be my father’s age to master the subtle perfections, something I confess I cannot see in coding or even the development of smarter digital assistants. A John Deere’s gearbox has a great deal more personality than a whole server farm of artificial intelligence, anyway, and more motive power besides.
There is whisper of a socially-distanced Christmas tree outing this weekend, something for which you must now make reservations. Still, hemming and hawing over a tree, even masked and six feet apart, is better than alternatives. Dragging down an ash log, I envisioned looking at the photo that will come from this outing; all of us, strangely aloof in pods, masks on and smirks and grins veiled, but still familiar, still recognizably, stubbornly family. There are some things — meals, stock options, jobs, companies, political fortunes — which are fickle, to be enjoyed in the instant for the pleasures they are. Their intensity of pleasure cannot be questioned; in fact, if the modern world excels at anything, it is intensity, explosions of the emotions which the deeper, older world is content to administer over lifetimes. But I am beginning to prefer the latter.
