Mid-life Tractor

Several of my male friends have kicked-off their mid-life crises.  They are scurrying around doing things like buying new sports cars, getting divorced, getting married, getting girlfriends, getting fit, changing careers, or shaving off all their hair and attempting to swim the English Channel.  You know, normal stuff.

My female friends don’t have time for mid-life crises.  We’re all too busy with lives – our own and those around us – to pause for a crisis.  We figure when we hit 90, we’ll finally have the time.  We just hope our bodies can keep up with our minds at that point.

My husband’s mid-life crisis, of course, didn’t approach normal.  He didn’t want a car or a girlfriend (as least as far as I know), or even to swim the English Channel.  What he wanted was a tractor.  He tried to disguise it under the umbrella of his life-long dream to build a house, but I knew it was really all about the tractor.  Ever since my three-year old daughter used to prance around the house singing, “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”, I’ve recognized that scary gleam in his eye.

He finally convinced me that we needed to build a new house.  Well, not really, but he convinced me to just give in on the subject. My main reluctance wasn’t around the stress of moving or of the added expense. The real issue is that when my husband talks about building a house, he’s not talking about sitting in a cushy architect’s office followed by weekly visits to the job sites, where you bring pizza and beer to the workers and walk around pointing out how you are going to arrange the furniture in your new living room. What he’s talking about is strapping on a tool belt, going to the lumber store, coming home with a pile of lumber, and digging in.  Unfortunately, I’m not kidding.

After months of searching, we finally found a piece of property that met our needs – close enough to school, work, and the grocery store, but still far enough out to feel ‘country’.  Neighbors close enough to help if you happened to cut your finger off with the table saw, yet not so close as to watch your TV through the side window.  As we stood surveying our new property the day we bought it, my husband turned to me with glee, “Time to buy the tractor.”

Of course, I’d stepped into the deep pit at this point.  I stood on a ledge about half-way down, the walls too smooth to climb and the top just beyond my grasping fingertips.  There was no way back up. The only hope was that a passage way out existed at the bottom.  I plunged the rest of the way in and we bought the tractor.

It arrived a few weeks later and suddenly it was impossible to imagine how anyone could possibly survive without one. (At least if you were my husband).

“Wow. We never could have planted 200 trees without a tractor. See how much we need one?”

“Or, we just wouldn’t have planted 200 trees.”

“Amazing. We never could have carried these boulders across the field without a tractor.”

“Did we really need to move the boulders?”

“You don’t have to rain on my parade… Hey, speaking of parades – do you think I should decorate the tractor and ride it in the neighborhood 4^th of July thing?”

He spent the next few weeks using the tractor to dig out the foundation for the barn which would become its new home.  Gushing about how it would be impossible to dig the foundation without a tractor, the irony of not needing a barn if we didn’t have a tractor was completely lost on him.  I let it go.  I figure when I’m 90, it’s gonna be pay-back time and you know what they say about pay-backs!