That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been riding it around in the yard, moving dirt from one place to another, dirt he claims he is moving for the garage – the garage we won’t have money to build for another two or three years.
And that also doesn’t mean he hasn’t been up and down the hill 450 times in the last few weeks filling in where rain has washed out the road, filling in where rain might wash out the road, filling in where the gravel has been pushed off the road by some enthusiastic guy in love with a tractor and not much else to do.
In fact, as I’m writing this, he and the tractor are bouncing past the window on the way to the garden 20 feet or so from the house to pick green beans. Much too far to walk.
No, in spite of his shenanigans on his beloved tractor, that is not what is getting him into trouble.
The dump and what he brings home from it is the source of my dearly beloved’s problem. My understanding is that one goes to the dump to take trash – old lamps, broken lawn chairs, cardboard boxes, plastic milk bottles, tin cans, things like that. Donnie, on the other hand, comes back with more than he left with. Today’s treasure was an old saw blade about 20 to 30 inches in diameter, an item needed to finish a sculpture he is making for me.
Gaining a little ally
This is my fault. When we were at the sidewalk art show last July, I pointed to the clever characters someone had made with parts of machines and old tools.
“You could do this,” I told him, knowing his love for fooling around with metal things. Now the yard is full of potential art pieces.
To make the matter worse, he has been cleaning out old barns and coming home with his pickup loaded with huge pieces of metal. He thinks of them as treasures and has stationed them all over the yard. They have important sounding names he has expounded excitedly about: tractor belt-driven cord wood saw, horse-drawn cultivator, horse-drawn log skid, hay grapple, corn seed planter, horse-shoeing forge, dump rake, single-bottomed plow. In reality, they are rusty pieces of metal and rotting wood.
And to make matters even worse than that, our little “darling boy” is as crazy about this load of iron cluttering up the yard as his grandfather. Yesterday when Donnie took Sabien with him to feed the chickens, Sabien headed straight for the rusty pile of litter. No amount of coaxing could entice the little fella to come away from the rusty wheel he was turning, all the while making car noises and smiling as if, like his grandfather, he thought this contraption was the greatest thing in the world. No doubt about it, Donnie has found himself an ally, a supporter of his cause, whatever that is.
Last week I caught Donnie trying to hide a truckload of ancient harnesses he’d brought home. He gave himself away when he went down to feed the chickens without Sabien. The little fella’s heart was broken. Big tears rolled down his cheeks as he stood at the door calling, “Bampa, Bampa.” No way can I stand that, so his Lollie took him down to be with his Bampa, and the three of us fed the chickies. When it came time to go back to the house, Bampa wanted to stay behind to “unload” his truck.
“I’ll help you,” I said. But he really didn’t want any help, and he gave many reasons why not. The truth of the matter was the junk he wanted to unload without me seeing.
“We getting a horse?” I asked looking into the back of his truck.
Her cold, cold stash
I must be honest here. There have been times when I’ve come home from the fabric shop and left my packages in the freezer until I was able to get them upstairs without you-know-who seeing that I’d bought more fabric to add to my already sizable stash, a stash that he points to every time I say anything about his junk. But at least I can use fabric. What is he going to do with all that metal?
Yesterday, when he came home from the dump, he had a bicycle that Wayne (Wayne, the man at the dump, and Donnie are on a first-name basis) had saved for Sabien. What can I say? I am outnumbered. But I have given Donnie notice: If anything else for horses comes home from the dump or a barn or someone’s field, I’m going to buy him a horse to use plowing the garden so he’ll have a use for that horse-drawn cultivator and all those other contraptions.
He could even use the horse for logging wood. We wouldn’t need the tractor.
We could use the money from selling the tractor to buy the horse. This idea has not gone over well. Only time will tell the outcome of this “junkyard war.” But I don’t think we’ll be getting a horse.
Jeanette Baldridge is a writer and teacher who lives in West Paris, who is a regular contributor to this column. She can be reached by e-mail at gine@hotmail.com.
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