Tractor Race at St. Hendon’s Cathedral

The sun is bright, the breeze is gentle, the doves are howling.  The sparrows approve of my new feeder and from here (our bedroom, facing the red tiled roofs and white chimneys, our  forested valley and far hill-side) the world appears to be just fine.  Of course it isn’t even sort of fine…the world is in dire circumstances with the only news being the death count and which place to blame for starting these dreadful times. But I can only think about contagion for a very limited length of time before I become upset, start getting depressed.

So I am grateful to my wife who observed and heard two big tractors, pulling carts, thunder up the road in front of our house, and offered, “It’s a good day to be a farmer.”  She’s so right.  The farmers work largely alone, but certainly spaced out socially, rarely in a clump.  And although they don’t appear to bathe often, they are among the first to benefit from the breeze, the rain, the sun, the whatever’s happening.  While the rest of us sleep, shelter, hide, they tinker with equipment, till their soil, tend their vines, feed their animals, take stock of their crops, and they roar joyfully around the villages in their big tractors, which probably is the best part of farming in these parts.   Any parts.

There must be supreme satisfaction in blasting along at 18 kilometers per hour with a two kilometer bumper-to-bumper string of busy, important people stacked up behind….They are like great, unwashed drum majors.

Now, those two tractors have just come back down the hill, swept past the round-about  by Saint Hendon’s Cathedral and disappeared.  Their carts were empty on the road up and empty on the way back too.  I suspect they were joy riding.  I so hope so.