My father was always in the field.

Wednesday, August 29, 2001

My father was always in the field. Well, that’s not really true. As a farmer, he spent a lot of time in the dairy barn, too. It just seemed like he was always in the field.

He spent a good portion of his life riding on our rainbow collection of farm tractors – the orange of the Allis-Chalmers, the red of the Farmall and the green of the Oliver. Sometimes he would get so busy in the field that he would forget about eating. This did not go unnoticed by my mother.

My mother was the kind of woman who liked people to eat regularly. You could not visit our home without having something to eat -&160;no matter what time of the day or night that you showed up. If your drive home was a distance longer than a block, my mother would make sandwiches and give them to you for the ride home. &uot;Just in case you get hungry,&uot; she’d say as she put a baloney sandwich into a guest’s hand.

Food was important on the farm. There was a lot of hard, physical labor; the kind that built healthy appetites. We ate a lot. Once chores were done in the morning, we ate breakfast. The rule on our farm was that the animals ate before the humans. Around mid-morning, we’d have a bit to eat and called it lunch. At noon, we would have dinner. In the mid-afternoon, we’d have a little lunch again. After milking the cows, we would have supper.

Now we eat lunch where dinner used to be and dinner where supper was. Supper is something that is eaten in church. I don’t know what the old lunches are called. Snacks or eating between meals or going off a diet, I guess. A snack is what we’d have if we were able to stay awake until 10 o’clock at night. Mom would say, &uot;I think maybe a little ice cream and crackers would help us sleep.&uot; We had to agree with her.

Mom knew the importance and timeliness of vittles. She worried about my father working so hard on those colorful tractors without him getting the proper nourishment. She solved the problem by taking lunch out to him. She’d pack sandwiches, cookies or doughnuts into a brown paper bag. The bag always showed a stain left by escaping butter or mayonnaise. Coffee and lemonade would be safely put away in a couple of old Stanley Thermos bottles that had led rough lives and had the dents and scars to prove it. There was normally a little bowl of Jell-O included in the feast as, of course, there was always room for Jell-O. On occasion, Mom would add a little potato salad or leftover hotdish (I was 15 years old before I knew what the word &uot;casserole&uot; meant) to the mix.

One day that I remember well, I was in the barn milking the Holsteins. My father was doing some cultivating in the field nearest to the back of the barn. Yes, the back of the barn made famous in many a story and fable. We were all running late on a very busy day. My mother had made my father his supper, placed it in its proper-used brown paper bag and had begun to walk toward the field. Then she thought better of it and decided to start up our old Allis-Chalmers WC tractor and drive that out to feed my father. Later, I glanced out the window to see my mother chasing the driverless tractor in circles. I learned later that she was checking to make sure she had brought the potato salad -&160;a move even more dangerous than talking on a cell phone – when she lost her balance and fell off the tractor. She had held onto the steering wheel as long as possible. This crimped the wheel, causing the runaway tractor to run away in small circles. My mother, thankfully unhurt, was in hot pursuit of the fugitive Allis-Chalmers.

I quickly removed the milkers from the cows and ran out into the field. My mother was still pursuing the escapee. I was able to get into the seat of the old iron horse and put a stop to its foolishness. Then I lectured my mother for her actions. It was always fun having the opportunity to lecture an adult. I told her that her senseless pursuit of the runaway machine could have led to serious injury.

&uot;Why did you have to chase the tractor?&uot; I asked.

&uot;It had your father’s potato salad,&uot; was her reply.

Hartland resident Al Batt writes columns for the Wednesday and Sunday editions of the Tribune.