Aunt Ruby's Green Tomato

At my request, we took a few minutes and traveled up the road to the red barn that had caught my eye when we first arrived. When we got there, it was, not surprisingly, a simple barn. On the side facing the road was a large, doorless opening allowing us to peer inside. It was remarkably clean and tidy. Parked inside was a single orange tractor. I couldn’t tell you much else about this item of farming machinery, for all motorized farm equipment seem large and imposing, and in my mind is just another word for amputation. The tractor standing before me that morning, however, silent and peaceful in the cool, half-light of the barn, with its orange skin thinning and polished by its rustic labors, had a dignity and beauty about it. There was little remarkable about this barn, and I felt a little foolish to have dragged people up here to see it, but this building and others like it have a soft spot in my heart for some reason. I think the allure was more than just the barn, but the entire package: how perfectly it sat in the field, how buildings like this improved with age, the dusty road and how it formed a perfect curved line leading up to it, drawn on the land by a thousand tractor trips. Stephanie was with Gabe and me, and I asked her to take a few seconds of video of the barn and the tractor – B roll, as they say in the business. She gave me a look as if to say, “Seriously? Why do you want footage of a dumb, old barn and a beat-up tractor?” She dutifully turned on the camera and collected a few seconds of video. We stepped back onto the deeply rutted road. It meandered away enticingly beyond the barn and up a gentle slope toward the foot of the mountains, finally disappearing from view around a distant curve. I wanted to follow it and see where it took me. Not today. We had more work to do and headed back toward the house. As we strolled along, a dozen Purple Martins darted every-which-way in the air thirty feet above our heads, absorbed in their own urgent business of the day.