touch up paint for kubota

What is your favorite family tradition?

Every year, my Dad would use his weekends - often plus some vacation days - to bring in the year’s supply of firewood. We’d get the week off school, if that was the plan (perks of being homeschooled!), and my Mom would plan quick and easy meals. We’d dig out the denim and leather work gloves, give our muck boots a run under the hose, and slather on the mosquito repellent. My Dad would load up the irreplaceable Stihl canvas bag with his chainsaw accessories - I can still remember when he upgraded and it came into our lives, and I can smell the two-cycle engine oil and sawdust odor that permeated it delightfully. We had a variety of tractors over the years - beginning with simple riding lawn mowers, and upgrading first to an old classic Ferguson, then the most adorable light but powerful Iseki Bolens, and finally to a sleek Kubota with a payment book and everything. Each would roll through the black dirt, often swinging a bushhog behind. But on firewood days, our faithful tractor would be pulling a trailer. It started as a lawn trailer - just a little cart for grass. I’ll never forget its painted black sides, scratched and battered by the logs that took it from new to well-loved. Then my Dad picked up a deal on an enourmous metal trailer that originally had done service hauling telephone poles. It had a half-circle cutout on each end for the pole to rest in and everything. It was solid iron and weighed an astronomical amount; the pink and white paint scheme and tall side posts for hanging linemen’s gear added to its conspicuousness. But it could hold a ton of firewood, and the Ferguson could keep it rolling. I’ll never forget riding in on top of a load of cut logs, clinging to one of those posts as we bounced over the rust and my Dad gunned the engine to keep us from bogging down. He’d always look back before gunning it, to catch our eyes and make sure we were prepared for the lurch. Eventually Ferguson was sold on eBay - adding my cute little brother and parking it in an apple orchard in bloom when we took its listing photos probably helped it sell almost instantly - and the Bolens (also an eBay deal) arrived. Bolens couldn’t really budge the monster trailer. So my Dad drove home one day with a cute SkiDoo trailer - nothing but wheels and a frame with two carpeted skids. He decked it with tongue and groove pressure-treated lumber and added a coat of light blue paint. Our wood trailer was born, and would last until just before I married and moved away from home. Each one of those trailers has memories wrapped up in the giant loads of firewood it hauled. The smell of crisp leaves and crushed spicebush leaves. The quiet rustling of a forest in the height of summer. The winding trails that my Dad cut and cleared, always with twists and turns because my Mom loved to walk and see what was around the bend. The poison ivy (which I am immune to), the jack-in-the-pulpits standing bright and tall, the fiddlehead ferns in their mysterious glory. The rush as I’d pedal my mountain bike a quarter mile back to the house and assemble cold lemonade and cups, feeling a childish wonder at how strange our home was with just me inside it. Driving my bike back while balancing a bottle of lemonade, watching intently on the path for sticks and bumps and ruts. The feelings of victory when we came in at the end of the night, gross and tired and sore and incredibly happy. The glow of a family working together, with a common enemy in the flies and mosquitos and a common goal filling that trailer. Later the piles would melt as we’d split and stack logs, and I learned to make neat ends and stack cord after cord. I didn’t love hauling wood on sleds up to the house in the dead of winter, but those summer and fall evenings spent out watching my Dad drop tired trees and picking them up are precious memories. My Mom still wears the same coat and picks up sticks, and my Dad still cuts trees for firewood. The giants of the forest don’t really grow on their newer, smaller land, and the muck was left behind for high ground, but the people are the same. I’ve tried to “go home again” in the last five years, but pregnancy and little ones and falling trees and stacking heavy logs didn't mix well. The times out in the woods are my most precious family memories of old, and my great regret is that in my late teens and early twenties I scorned those days and wiggled out of them, pleading school or sickness or work. I’d give so much to slip into muck boots and walk under the sun-kissed trees with my Dad, watching for his signals and occasionally shouting over the ear protection, and rolling giant logs after he carefully dropped and sectioned off the trees. But they say you can’t go home again. The old house is there, but the yard was changed to horse pasture, and dishonest loggers trashed much of the glorious forest. We still keep in touch with the people next door, and someday - someday I want to wander their trails right to the border and peek into the land I grew up on.