40 Years
Posted 6/4/2008 7:41am by Eugene Wyatt.
On Tuesday Senator Barack Obama became the Democratic Party's nominee for President of the United States.
On Tuesday I cut the paddock where the rams would go for their next grazing rotation. The orchard grass had matured to 3 feet in height. Letting the sheep in would trample it. Cutting the grass to a 6 inch height would prevent this and facilitate re-growth in the same way that mowing a lawn does. The grass was flowering and pollen was thick in the air and I was sneezing madly as I cut the weedy stalks down with the five foot rotary cutter, colloquially called a "brush hog", attached to the three point hitch of my old red MF tractor. At 540 RPM the cutter can knock down most vegetation, even saplings up to 1.5 inches in diameter; it is made by Woods, an equipment manufacturer headquartered in Illinois. The model I own is called a Dixie Cutter.
When I’m on the high horse of my tractor with the hog screaming behind me, laying waste to everything in my path, I see the Union Army's Major General William Tecumseh Sherman on his March to the Sea, cutting a 50 mile wide swath of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah, in the winter of 1864. That Dixie Cutter is a hell of a machine.
Over the fireplace I've hung a family relic, a snakeskin handled sword from the Civil War. Inscribed on its blade is “Stand by the Union.”
When I’m on the high horse of my tractor with the hog screaming behind me, laying waste to everything in my path, I see the Union Army's Major General William Tecumseh Sherman on his March to the Sea, cutting a 50 mile wide swath of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah, in the winter of 1864. That Dixie Cutter is a hell of a machine.
Over the fireplace I've hung a family relic, a snakeskin handled sword from the Civil War. Inscribed on its blade is “Stand by the Union.”
In 1968 Senator Robert F. Kennedy said in a speech to the Voice of America that things are "...moving so fast in race relations a Negro could be president in 40 years…we are making progress. We are not going to accept the status quo."
Bobby Kennedy stood by the Union.
Tuesday was the day when Obama became the Democratic nominee for President of the United States, almost 147 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
"Stand by Barack">Dixie Cutter>the swath cut to the sea>the sword>"Stand by the Union"
Not subtlety on my part but perhaps too short of a *shorthand of association* to mark an historic day, an arrival or rather another step forward; alluded to in a tone of caution (the imperatives, their parallelism) about the work yet ahead for the people, for the country.
Thank you for letting me publish your recipe and your energetic, well written, anecdotal cover letter.
Eugene