She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy

PG expects Freudian practitioners could make something of the comparison between a tractor and male sexuality in all of its cruder forms.

Having actually driven tractors a very long time ago, PG can attest that driving a tractor all day in the summer as in the following video results in the driver being covered with sweat everywhere.

Sweating on a tractor with a bare chest means that lots and lots of dust and grit will have collected on the upper half of your body and worked its way down well past the beltline as well. If you used the tractor to pull a manure spreader, it’s even nastier. Boots and socks will be black, brown or red, depending on the color of the soil.

Since the sweat and grit have been collecting from early that morning, the smell will not be that of someone who spent 30 minutes on a treadmill before taking a shower. It’s going to be rank, which won’t bother the rest of the farm/ranch hands because they’ll smell just as bad.

More than a few farm and ranch houses have a shower room close to a side entrance. Walk in that door and you’re likely to encounter a mud room well-stocked with dirty boots that Momma will never allow in the house under any circumstance.

You take off your boots in the mud room and walk into the shower room. (No fancy fixtures, some of the showers are home-made from tin, just like the bin that holds cattle feed.)

You get completely naked, dropping all your clothes into a separate laundry bag. If Mamma has complained about having to do too many loads of laundry, you might hang your jeans on a hook to put on the next day.

Your cap, of course, will never be washed so the caps all have their own hooks, probably in the mud room. If you went to the feed store or the grain elevator with a clean hat, people would think you were from Chicago or Denver and immediately know you weren’t the right kind of person. You do get a new hat from the elevator and feed store 2-3 times per year, but you don’t stand out because everybody else in the place just got their own new hat. The tractor dealer is also good for a new hat once in awhile.

Back to the shower room. You wash everything, maybe twice, to get all the dirt off, then stand under cold water straight from the well for awhile to cool off.

When you get out and dry off, you notice your farmer tan. (white wherever the feed store t-shirt covers your body and really brown everywhere else except for your legs which are also fish-belly white – yes, you look really dumb when you to to the swimming pool in town) The farmer tan has gotten a few shades browner and you have some new scrapes and scabs on your hands and forearms from trying to fix whatever broke on the tractor or what you were pulling that day.

At this point, you realize that you have no clean clothes anywhere near the shower room. If you haven’t aggravated Momma too badly in the last couple of days and if you shout politely, she might bring you something to wear. If not, you wrap the towel around your waist, watch out for your younger brother who likes to sneak up and snatch it away, and go into your room.

During that entire day and through the night, no girl acts like she loves your tractor. And if you do happen to spend some time with a girl, she may complain that the callouses on your hands are rough and holding hands isn’t nearly as nice as when you’re in school and the callouses have retreated to wherever they go when you’re using your hands for holding pencils and typing.