In the year 1970, the John Deere Model 5020 tractor was a significant piece of machinery. I know because my father and grandfather made sure to tell me so. The toy version my grandparents, Stan and Edla, gave me upon my entry into this world still holds a prominent position on our library shelf, a reminder of their quaint tradition—each grandson received his birth-year’s prominent tractor in toy form. This was not some cheap plastic model, rather, each was an accurate metal replica of a real-world machine. In the days before internet shopping, these toys were hard to come by, unless you knew where to look; your best bet was a farm supply store. Throughout my childhood, the shelves of my grandma and grandpa’s favorite haunt, the farm store in Sterling, Colorado, were filled with model tractors, combines, implements, and trucks. John Deere, Ford, International Harvester, Case, Allis Chalmers, all the major manufacturers were featured. A farm equipment aficionado could find whatever cultivated his imagination.
This model tractor now holds a special place in my heart. It is tied to the memories of a seven-year-old playing for hours under the swingset in the powdery dirt on a hot Kansas summer day. By the time my mother called me and my brothers inside, we were covered with a fine layer of dust, channeled into lines along our arms and legs by the salty sweat of the afternoon. I carried my 5020 inside, set it on the porch floor, and dutifully obeyed my mother’s instructions to get cleaned up for dinner. There it sat, until the next opportunity to take it outside and work another imaginary field. The knicks and scratches, the missing rubber exhaust stacks, the lack of the original box, all of these factors conspire to make my particular toy worthless as a collector’s item, but it is priceless nonetheless.
1 John 2:15 “Do not love the world or the things in the world.” Let’s be real, it’s just a thing—all things pass away, but the emotional ties to my grandparents and family this artifact evokes remain with me to this day. I have another farm toy, a green and red truck even more beaten and weathered than my tractor. It was my father’s. As I related in Dryland Lament, he passed away twenty five years ago, at the age I am now. Were he alive now to ponder that truck, I wonder what emotions it would conjure? Memories of the Northeastern Colorado farm, the fields, the wind, the dust? His childhood was not so different from mine, growing up on the High Plains, dreaming of bigger machines and better harvests. The mythos of my (and his) rural American upbringing lingers on.
Related Posts
