I spent several hours trimming trees and cleaning out gutters today, the kind of chore for which I dig out my old leather boots. Over the course of many trips back and forth across the yard, dragging tree branches to a big pile that will supply indoor kindling and outdoor bonfires over the next few months, I noticed that much of the yard is pretty rough looking. Bare spots, dips from where I'd burned out some stumps but never really filled it back in right, weedy places. "Maybe I could buy something small like a Super C, and find a rear-mounted tiller for it," I thought to myself. The northwest corner of the yard is where the barn would go, the one where I'd keep the Super M (and I guess the Super C, too, as long as I'm daydreaming). Probably keep the bikes and lawnmower and extension ladder and such in there also, I suppose, but mostly it'd be a barn. I'd have to build it myself to keep the cost down and because I'd need it to be an honest barn rather than one of those pretend things I see out in front of the Home Depot. Have to have a pretty high door to clear the muffler on the Super M, and of course some good workspace, so it'd end up being pretty big. I'd have to add some barn details, maybe a haymow door up high. I'd wear my old leather boots while I built it. Right now the woodpile is on that spot. Not this summer but each of the two before, we had a crew thin out the trees in the back yard and cut down some dead ones from the front, maybe 20 total, decent-sized, 6" to 12" in diameter I guess. The crew ground the tops into mulch and cut the wood into fireplace length for us, and by now I've got all but a little bit of it split. That's a job for the leather boots, and while I split I remember splitting with my dad and loading wood into the old two-wheel wagon, hooked to Dad's '48 Case. We just had the one wagon, so it hauled everything. Kids, manure, firewood, fertilizer, seed, hoes and rakes. Pumpkins and corn and tomatoes. Somewhere in those years as a teenager my feet found a comfortable size and settled down in it, and I didn't outgrow the BiltRite Huron crepe soled leather workboots that I'd gotten somewhere along the way. They were with me when we baled hay with the Rosenbergers down the road, and when I painted the Ross's barns, and when we fixed the fenceline. They were cold and wet and later stiff on days when I should have chosen the rubber knee-highs instead, but they were warm and clean and felt good on evenings when we looked back on an empty hayfield and a full sweet-smelling barn. Most of the years since then, 27 or 28 I guess, haven't seen me often in the field. Now and then the boots still come out, soles too smooth but okay for what little I ask of them. The tops seem unchanged, soft and light brown up high by the little brass ears that I wrap the last few turns of the laces around, but down low the bits of roofing tar, flecks of paint, anonymous scuffs and nicks blend into the deep gray-brown of history. Such a plain thing, these boots, but they remember, and they wait with me. They keep faith while my work years are filled with desks and talking and thinking and writing, while too many bills leave too little left, while toy tractors on my desk and tractor shows in the summer, and dreamed-of backyard barns unbuilt, fill in for the life of my past and future. Copyright
2004 by Dean Vinson |
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