The Tractors That Saved My Farm

I was sixty seven years old and sitting on my own porch step doing arithmetic that would not come out right no matter how many times I ran it, when I heard the first engine.

Twelve days. That was what the letter from Prairie Trust Farm Credit said, in the kind of careful language that tries not to sound like what it is. Twelve days until the bank took the three hundred and twenty acres my father cleared with a team of mules in 1951, the house he built board by board the year I was born, and the barn my grandfather raised with eleven neighbor men and a potluck dinner before any of them owned a tractor at all. Two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars. I had read the number so many times the paper had gone soft at the fold, the way a Bible gets soft at the Psalms you turn to most.

I want to tell you how a farm that has been in a family for three generations gets down to twelve days, because I think people hear “foreclosure” and picture a man who gambled or drank his land away, and that was not me. It was a bad corn year, then a worse one. It was a hip replacement I put off two years too long because the copay scared me more than the limp did. And mostly, if I am honest with myself and with you, it was June.

My wife got sick in the spring three years ago, and by the time the doctors in Wichita had a name for what was wrong with her, the kind of care she needed was not the kind our insurance thought was reasonable to pay for. I did not care what was reasonable. I would have sold every acre I owned twice over to buy her six more months, and in a quieter way, over eighteen months, that is more or less what I did. I do not regret one dollar of it. I would do it again tomorrow morning. But the ledger does not know the difference between a debt you regret and a debt you would choose again with your whole heart, and Prairie Trust Farm Credit is not in the business of forgiving either kind.

June passed in the fall of my sixty fifth year, on a Tuesday, in the front bedroom with the window she always wanted open even in January, because she said she liked to fall asleep to the sound of the windmill. I buried her in the cemetery behind Linden Hill Community Church, under the one oak tree the whole plot has, because she used to say if she had to be somewhere forever she wanted shade.