Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

Here is a picture I took back not long after we were married. We were doing some landscaping out back here and hubby was using the Oliver tractor to blade out a pile of dirt. So this is what it looked like before. I haven't taken a pic of it since he got it turned over. But this morning I heard it chugging up the hill, a little the worse for wear, but still going. He'd taken the hood off of it, and the front white grill, along with the exhaust pipe. As you might imagine it leaked quite a bit of fluids all over, so when he initially tried to start it there was smoke and it wouldn't fire straight off. He took one spark plug out, tried it again and said a jet of flame shot out to the side-a combo of gas and oil in it. He hopped off and blew on it to get it out. *sigh* But then it did fine, except for a bit more smoking. Amazingly enough neither of the two lights were broken or even bent at all. You can just barely see them mounted on either side just over the back ...

This is something we usually pray over our breakfast every day. And more than once in the past 5 years I have lived on the dairy, I have been thankful that the Lord hears our prayers. Today was a great example of that. It was about 1 pm and hubby comes in the door and announces that I almost became a widow this afternoon. Hmmm... He went down into the creek bottoms to get a load of firewood. The road back up is very steep and, after the recent rains, very muddy. Something went wrong with the little Oliver tractor; he started slipping backwards, the clutch started slipping too, and it just kept going backwards until it was jack-knifed. The wood trailer was up on top of the tractor, which was tipped over. Here is what it looked like initially: It could so easily have gone straight over on him. We brought the other tractor down and tried to pull the Oliver out from under the trailer. It just wouldn't work because the trailer was wedged on the back wheel of the Oliver. This i...