The Tractor Shed.

It’s gone now, torn down when my cousin and her family bought my grandparents’ house.  It sat behind Popdaddy and Grandmother’s house, just up the hill from their store.  My grandfather built it in the 1940’s. My father used it when he started farming as a young man in the 1950’s and used it until he built his own shed years later.  But it was much more than just a shed or pole barn.  It was a classroom, a university for me.  I got my most important education in that old shed. 

It was my father’s office, headquarters, and refuge.  It was where he worked on equipment, stored seed, chemicals, and fertilizer, weighed the cotton the field workers had picked (before he had a mechanical cotton picker).  It was where he met bankers, salesmen, and anyone who had business with him. It’s where he went when he needed to let off steam.  He’d find something to beat on or work on, or build and get rid of his stress.  

It’s where I learned the most important life lessons he taught me.  Not by his words, but by his actions   He didn’t believe in taking equipment to a repair shop. We fixed it ourselves.  By doing this, I learned basic mechanics, basic welding, how to repair and maintain equipment, and most of all, how to cut expenses by doing it yourself.  I learned how to treat employees. How they were  working for their living just like he was.  If you want them to work hard for you, then you treat them fairly, pay them a fair wage, and care about their well being. I learned to treat people with respect and dignity, no matter their station in life. That you give the tractor driver the same respect you do the banker.  I learned the Golden Rule there before I ever heard it in a church.  

It’s also where I learned the fine art of swearing!  My mother always said that Daddy’s favorite phrase was “son of a bitch”!  When I was a little fellow, maybe 3 or 4, one of my toys broke.  Mama said I looked at it and said, “You son of a bitch”!  I got a spanking, and Daddy got a very stern lecture when he got home!  

As I said, it’s gone now.  I still look up the hill for it whenever I pass. In my mind, I see Daddy working on a tractor. I see Popdaddy walking up the hill for his afternoon nap.  I see Bill Rawls, and Joe Thomas, waiting to start work, driving the tractors.  I see myself, playing in a trailer of picked cotton.  I see people and things I love.  That’s what the tractor shed means to me.  It means love.