The Buddy Seat I Gave My Granddaughter

The North Eighty

Along about eleven o’clock the tank was full. I radioed Kim, who was running our grain cart with the old blue tractor.

She pulled the cart up alongside us while we both kept rolling. I swung the auger out over the cart and unloaded on the go, the gold corn arcing over without either machine stopping.

Ava pressed her face to the glass watching that corn pour. “Mama’s driving the tractor,” she said, like it was a wonder.

“Your mama’s been driving that tractor since she was fourteen,” I said. “She ran the cart beside your grandpa every fall.”

“Your mama can back a loaded cart into a shed slot you could not fit a wheelbarrow into.”

Ava looked at me. “Nobody told me Mama did that.”

And that right there, that one sentence out of a ten year old, told me I had been right to climb down off my chair.

Nobody told her. Her own mother had run the harvest alongside her grandfather for years.

In the nine years since Kim married Troy, that had quietly turned into something nobody mentioned, something from before. Ava had grown up thinking the farm was the boys and the kitchen was the girls.

We cut the whole north eighty together, Ava and me. Eighty acres, all morning and past noon.

She never once asked to go to the house. She ate her sandwich with one hand and kept her eyes on the monitor with the other, and called me the numbers with her mouth full.

Twice we hit a wet draw and the header started to plug. I had to back the machine up and clear the feederhouse.

I showed her how you do that. Slow and careful. You keep your hands well clear of the rollers, every single time, no matter how big a hurry you are in.

When we took the last pass, the corn head came up out of the final rows and the field lay open and shorn behind us, clean to the dirt.

I shut the header off and we sat there a second in the big quiet.

“We did it,” Ava said. “We did the whole thing.”

“You did the monitor on the whole thing,” I said. “Two hundred and fourteen average. You want to know what that is worth?”

She nodded hard.

“Corn’s bringing about four dollars and ten cents a bushel down at the elevator right now,” I said. “Eighty acres, two fourteen a piece, you do that in your head.”

She could not, not quite, and I was not going to make her, so I told her.

“That is a little over seventy thousand dollars of corn, honey, that you and I just brought off your great grandpa’s ground this morning. You helped make sure every dry bushel of it counted.”

She was quiet a long time, looking out at the empty field.

“The boys didn’t do a field,” she finally said. “They just rode.”

“No,” I said. “They just rode. You worked.”