End of an Era: The Farm Sale

 

The link to Car Auction's website and close-up photos of the items for sale can be found by clicking HERE. 

Once Randy retires for good, I think he could have a job driving sale bills all over this part of Kansas. He spent a lot of time tacking sale bills for our August 13 farm auction to bulletin boards and windows in seed stores, co-ops, parts stores, restaurants and anywhere else he could think of.

Even after he got the initial sale bills up and displayed, he's watched the local bulletin boards, putting more in their place if someone took a sale bill off the board for a closer look. 

He's also spent a lot of time organizing equipment and getting it arranged for our sale. The auction will begin at 10 AM, Saturday, August 13, at his folks' place.

 It still seems a bit surreal.  

There's certainly a wide array of selections for any farm shoppers ...

... from an old horse-drawn corn sled he found in the shelterbelt ... 

 ... to our combine. (While it's certainly not the height of modern equipment, it's at least in this century.)

His most recent project was getting the varied and sundry paraphernalia that gets collected in farm outbuildings. There's quite an assortment of "stuff" on two trailers.

I must admit that one of those trailer items tugged at my heart strings.

I've written more than once about this old Tupperware bucket. It was part of our "inheritance" from his parents' house. We used it during calving season to sterilize the pulling chains. Sometimes, it held a mix of colostrum to feed to a baby who was struggling. So it was part of the equipment we used to welcome new babies to The County Line. I do miss having the babies in the corral just a few hundred yards from the house. But we found that Tye & Todd have liberal visitation policies with our mamas and babies, so it's all right. It's just an adjustment.

However, the dingy old Tupperware is more than the sum of its parts. It's kind of a passing-of-the-torch symbol - a hold-it-in-your-hands representation of Randy's and my places in the fifth-generation of our respective farm families. It used to be housed at Melvin & Marie's back entrance during calving season. Then, it "lived" on our back porch during calving season and in our basement during the rest of the year.

Melvin and a bull in an undated photo

I wish I had a photo of Melvin and Randy using the bucket together. I know it happened, but I wasn't recording every moment in blogland back then. For seven years of our marriage, I was driving back and forth to Hutchinson as a reporter and editor at The Hutchinson News.

So seeing that bucket made it all seem pretty real - kind of silly, I suppose, but you never know what is going to affect you.

I'm not the only one waxing nostalgic. As kids, Randy and Lyle would climb on the old corn sled that was in the farmstead trees and would move the levers, playing "farmer." He found old toys that he and Lyle used, but they were too rusty and worn out to bring any money, so he disposed of them. 

Getting the fencing materials organized made him reminisce about the "miles and miles and miles" of electric fence he built through the years - and then had to roll back up. (I helped some with that process, too.) He says he's not sorry to see the hand-held post hole diggers go or an old T-post driver that he almost lost his thumb using. (Fence building has often found us being nostalgic. Click HERE for another blog post about that.)

The old 8N Ford tractor was a workhorse in fence building, too. Five generations have sat on that old seat. We'll likely take a few more photos on that relic on sale day before we watch it leave the farmstead.

April 2012 - Baby Kinley, Jill & Randy

There's one relic that got transferred from the tool shed at his folks' house to our house. An old scoop shovel that belonged to his great-grandfather, Simon Fritzemeier. Randy says it's twice as heavy as the scoop shovels used today, but there's still some family history there that he wasn't willing to let go of. (More on that next time.)

This process has been a mix of emotions. But, Randy feels at peace about the decision and the timing, so how can I feel differently?

He's already planning a trip to several national parks this fall. He's only gotten to use his lifetime pass to National Parks once before now. I have a feeling it's going to get a workout in the coming years.