“------- was a collector of -------.” Tell what s/he collected and how s/he has
them stored.
“Butch Miltich,
don’t you dare bring that filthy thing in this house,” Martha yelled.
“But it isn’t even dirty, Martha,” Butch
said.
“I told you you couldn’t have those
dirty things anywhere near the house.
Just look at the mess outside.
Tractors all over the yard, in the fields, and in the orchard, when are
you going to stop bringing them home?”
Butch squared his shoulders, pushed
himself to his full five foot six inches and said, “Well Martha, I say my
miniature tractors will be displayed in my half of the house. That means you will have to move part of your
collection out of my end of the front room.”
“Never!” Martha’s face turned red with rage. “You built those shelves for my things and
they will stay there.”
She put her hands on her over-sized hips
and glared at Butch. Pointing a finger
at the door, she stomped a foot and said, “Now you just get back out that door
with your filthy little thing.”
Butch turned around and walked
outside. He slowly lowered himself into
the rocking chair on the porch. ‘This
ol’ arthritis is killing me today. Must
be rain coming,’ he thought.
With gnarled fingers, he caressed the
miniature tractor he held. Ever since
his arthritis had gotten so bad that he couldn’t drive a real tractor anymore,
he was shown a new way to collect tractors, miniature ones. Now Martha said he couldn’t have them in the
front room. Well, he’d show her. He pushed himself out of the rocker and
limped to the barn.
Martha was watching out the kitchen
window to make sure he wouldn’t come back inside with that dirty little
tractor. She said, “Well, I sure showed
him who’s boss.”
She turned to admire her shelves full of
salt and pepper shakers. What a lot of
memories. Like the little lava palm
trees their son brought back from
“Just what are you going to do with
that?” Martha demanded.
Butch walked past her without answering
and entered the front room. Martha then
noticed a hammer and shelf brackets in his back pockets. “You old fool. What do you think you’re going to do?”
Without answering, Butch started
measuring the wall where he would put his shelf. “Butch, you don’t think you’re going to put
another shelf in here, do you?”
“Yep,” was all Butch
said as he laid out the brackets and started screwing them onto the board. That finished, he turned his head towards
Martha and quietly said, “Either you move those salt and pepper sets from those
three shelves or I put this shelf up for my miniature tractors, right beside
them.”
The quiet tone of Butch’s voice wasn’t
like him and it made Martha wonder what had gotten into him.
Butch left the front room but soon
returned with a box. “Are you going to
move them or do I have to?” he asked as he reached for the first set of tiny
metal coffee pots.
“No!
Don’t you dare touch them,” she yelled, “I’ll do it. But you know you have the whole barn to fill
with those----those little things.”
“I know I do, but I will not sit out in
the cold barn to enjoy my collection, no more than you would sit in the
basement to enjoy yours.”
As Martha carefully laid the shakers in
the box, Butch smiled and thought back to how his collection of tractors got
started. He was twelve when his father
bought their first tractor and he faithfully cleaned it after every use. When Butch asked why, his father said, “If
you buy something, whether new or used, you should take care of it and keep it
clean and in good running order.”
Butch’s father said that one day that
tractor would belong to Butch. It is
still sitting beside the barn under an awning, all clean and new looking.
Every time Butch sold his hay crop and
wheat, he’d start watching for auction sales that offered tractors. Sometimes they didn’t run and it gave him
great pleasure in getting them back in working order and all cleaned up. Sometimes they were unfixable but he still
cleaned the grime off them.
One day Butch noticed he was hurting a
lot more that usual. He would bend over
to pick something up and it hurt his back so much that he could hardly stand up
again. The pain kept getting worse and
finally he went to the doctor who told him he had rheumatoid arthritis in his
spine and he would have to cut down on all the work he was doing. The doctor reminded Butch that at age 80, it
was time to slow down.
So Butch rented out his hay and wheat
fields. Word spread and people would
stop in to admire and talk about the tractors as they walked among them, asking
Butch all sorts of questions and one was always, “How many tractors do you
have?”
Butch never stopped to count all the tractors standing idle as silent sentinels, reminders of happier times when they were used to do meaningful work. So Butch decided to count them, but was always loosing track of which ones he had already counted. He had to do more than just count, so he cut out 4”x5” pieces of plywood, made a hole in the center top of each one, for a piece of wire, and numbered them one through twenty-five. After wiring a number onto each steering wheel, Butch stood back, whistled, and said, “Well, I’ll be. I need five more numbers.”
He quickly made them and wired them on the remaining tractors. Looking up, he saw Ben Murphy, from the next
farm, carrying a paper bag. Ben said,
“That was a great idea, Butch. How many
tractors do you have?”
Butch smiled and proudly proclaimed, “Thirty!”
Ben shook his head and said, “Sorry Butch, you are wrong,” as he handed
Butch the paper bag.
Butch looked surprised and asked, “What is this?”
Ben said, “You knew I was in the cities last week and when I seen that,”
as he pointed to the bag, “it had ‘Butch’ written all over it. Thanks for being a good neighbor all these
years.”
Butch reached in the bag and brought out a box with a plastic front. He
turned it around and seen the most wonderful tiny tractor. “Gosh, Ben, I didn’t know they made tractors
this small. Thank you so much. It’s a treasure, for sure!”
Since that unexpected miniature was handed to him, Butch had acquired
ten more, and today, when Ben took him to the hardware store, Jake, the owner,
said, “Thanks for your business all these years, Butch. Here’s a little something for you.”
Now he was tired of going out to the barn to look at his twelve
miniature tractors and wanted them where he could look at them all the
time. He was getting disabled from the
arthritis and knew he had to start selling off his collection of normal sized
tractors. With his new collection, it
wouldn’t seem like such a loss.
He wondered why Martha couldn’t be more understanding, since she had her
salt and pepper collection that she bragged about to anyone that would
listen. But fair is fair because he had
to own up to the fact that he wasn’t getting any younger and soon might be
house bound. Arthritis had a way of
doing that.
One thing for sure, he would never sell his father’s tractor and hoped
their son would take care of it just as he had done all those years
He had sold several of the large tractors, which hurt him to do so,
because it seemed like he was selling off his kin. But it was a necessity, and he took pleasure
in looking at the miniature tractors, which would soon be in the front room for
him to enjoy every day.