Happiness

Happiness comes in many shapes. A grandchild's giggle, a sunset over water, a familiar song playing and accompanied at a whisper by a voice you've loved for half a century - and today it came to me on a piece of grimy cardboard.

A mile from our house is a few acres of prairie I'm trying to turn into a savanna.

If you don't know what that is, look it up. I've only got about 500 words to work with here.

Anyway, I have eight heirloom apple trees planted there, scattered hither and yon. It's a long way from anyplace. I actually spent more money on deer proof fencing than I spent on the trees. So, the trees are safe from being nibbled to death, but they still need watering, which was a bit of a problem. I have a twelve-gallon water tank that fits in the back of our utility vehicle, which is not nearly enough water. I have a thousand-gallon water tank on a trailer, but that seems a little cumbersome. Then I remembered that in the back corner of our machine shed, we have a small sprayer my son built in shop class a few decades ago. It holds a 120-gallon tank, a size even Goldilocks would agree is just right. Hot weather was on the horizon, so I pulled the sprayer out in the open to see if using it was feasible.

Attached to the pump with a zip tie was a piece of cardboard with this inscription: “Pump lubricated with WD40, 10/12/16.”

It was my dad's handwriting. He had just turned 90 years old when he wrote it, and he was doing what he always did, making sure everything was properly tucked in when winter was coming.

Looking at it made me smile. A quote I've often thought about is, “who we are is who we were.” So many little things around our farm reflect back on my dad's relentless practicality and innovation. I never carried a scrum of loose wrenches in the cab of the combine, because dad built a holder for two toolboxes (one for tools, one for spare parts) in the engine compartment and made a rack for the most commonly used wrenches on the outside of the machine. One brutal fall when we were still doing farm work long after bitter cold weather had descended, I came to work one morning to find dad had made a cabinet, heated with a light bulb, for the grease guns and spare grease, so we could do a proper job of lubricating the equipment. The list could go on and on.

We had a neighbor who purposely never learned how to weld, because he didn't want a pile of scrap iron littering the yard. He was a fine man and a good neighbor, but Dad just shook his head sadly at his flawed reasoning. Why in the world would you let someone else do something for you if there was a chance you could do it yourself?

Oh, well. I took the sprayer booms off and changed some plumbing around and, bada-bing, bada-boom, tree watering device. I stored the sprayer booms in the back of the shed just in case I ever need them again.

The piece of cardboard is on my desk.

Copyright 2025 Brent Olso

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