On the first day, she prepares to mow the pastures--she checks the vital fluids on her dad's old John Deere A.

The pure steel of old prosperity--lichen growing where grease and oil and dirt have clung.

In cracks and crevices--in the oily places below the radiator, in the toolbox half full of squarish rusty iron parts and tools, their use long forgotten--the more frequently used tools kept on top of them. Below these pieces never disturbed are seed and chaff of harvests long ago.

The old and gone immigrant patriarchs of her family remembered--amongst the dust and sunshine conversing in German above the noise of the machinery.

Backing out of the shed, she engages the clutch and the engine responds with the familiar pop--the belt pulley starts to spin, the groove in the paint where her grandfather liked to touch a kitchen match to light his pipe . . .

"So reliable," he would often say of the tractor.

"At least something is," she mutters to herself as she climbs down to open the pasture gate.