Out With the Old

Being a grandma myself but living with a 90-year-old parent out in the middle of nowhere on a farm, I can use all the help I can get.  Even though we don't really have a working farm anymore (our pastures are leased to a neighboring cattleman) we still have a lot of chores around here.  Recently after having pruned some rose bushes which were practically as tall as the house, I piled up a load of cuttings into our trusty red wagon to haul them down to a spot near the barn where we keep accumulating piles of limbs, brush, leaves, cuttings, grass until such time as our burn ban is lifted so we can dispose of this stuff like good country folk are supposed to do.  I went through the gate, fastened it back to keep any wayward cows from escaping and headed off down the hill.  After about 25 yards I realized the load I was pulling just felt different for some reason.  Looking back over my shoulder I saw the old wagon sitting back near the gate, and that made me wonder, well, what the heck had I been pulling and dodging through all those cow patties.  That's when I discovered that all that was in my hand was the handle and the front axle!  The bolts holding those two pieces on had rusted through the bed of the wagon! 

The next few days were spent looking for a new vehicle!  I checked on line and these little red wagons that we all grew up with as children ranged in price from about $75 to over $100!  And this was just for an ordinary one, not one of the fancy ones with siderails or anything like that.  I finally found the best price at a hardware store about 20 miles away.  I wound up making three trips to pick it up, because it wasn't in stock, then the salesman discovered he had ordered the wrong one, and then of course we discovered the price I had been quoted was wrong.  The manager agreed that they should give me the wagon for the lower price I had been quoted, especially since I had made three trips to pick it up and probably used a tank of gas going back and forth so many times.  Of course nothing comes assembled anymore but the salesman assured me it was quite easy (obviously, he's never seen me wrestling with a screwdriver) but did warn me that placing the little covers over the wheel spokes was the most difficult of the tasks.  Well, after two hours of assembling the axles and the handle and taking it apart and redoing it because I had put it on backward the first time around and making sure all the bolts had nuts (of course I dropped a washer through the slats of the front porch and it quickly disappeared into whatever lurks under the house but luckily I found a suitable replacement in the junk drawer), then it was time to deal with those spoke covers (if that's not the proper terminology, just pretend you understand what I'm talking about).  As it turned out that was the easiest part of all, so now we have a brand-new (albeit very expensive) red wagon that I put together myself!

Granted, it doesn't have the character of the old one, but it's quickly developing a few dents and scrapes and scratches every day and I'm convinced it soon will look like an old, trusted farmhand.