A hollow fills the senses, with politics kept at bay

Diesel engines are loud and, having spent the past 50 years or so playing and listening to earsplitting rock 'n' roll music, I now wear ear plugs whenever I'm on my tractor because I'm tired of intoning 'Say again?” And as I drive, I sing - a big Broadway voice so that deer, coyote, and imaginary ticket holders at the far end of the meadow can hear me.

Singing with earplugs is acoustically brilliant and on this day as summer is getting underway I'm belting out a Dave Mason tune, from 40 years ago. 'There ain't no good guy. There ain't no bad guy. There's only you and me and we just disagree.” It's the story of my life, the minority voice, not yet crossing the threshold to ‘crazy person' but close, very close.

Out here in the hollow, I frighten an achingly beautiful new fawn skipping across the grass in front of me and she scampers in to a thicket, her mother nowhere in sight. Dark clouds move toward me from the northeast, from out by a place called Iron Hill, and I'm on a ridge with a view, a lightning magnet. So I chug back to the hollow.

Under a mulberry tree, I turn the cutter and tractor off. The fruit is dark and ripe, and I work on a handful of the wild sweetness, smearing a couple of them across my cheeks, a dark purple war paint, like something I would have done at age 10. In those days we still played cowboys and Indians on far hills, shooting and dying many times in the same battle.

Ten is a great age. Oh, you might have worn glasses or sported braces, but life was pretty good. When I was 10, a new guy named Kennedy was president and I understood none of it, except knowing that my father refused to enter any building with the Kennedy name. It is perhaps more a comment on my father than anything else, yet I know if mom still lived she'd likely avoid anything Trump. We are a complicated species.

Walnut trees deepest in the woods have finally fully leafed out. In a couple of months they'll be the first to drop those leaves, all of the energy focused on forming walnuts, very large seeds. Fragrant, blue Dame's Rocket (sounds like an alt-country band) wildflowers are done for the season, a few still wilting in a bell jar on a windowsill in my kitchen.

Later on, when the diesel engine is shut off and put away in the outbuilding, the only sound in the woods will be the sighing of breezes in the cedars, and the chatter of birds. When darkness rolls in, birds will quiet except for the owl that has been hanging out here for a number of years, keeping the mouse population down.

Another hour with a six-foot cutter whirring behind my tractor and I should be finished. A half century ago I was piloting tractors for area farmers, never sure why they trusted a 15-year-old to do something as important as farming. When I'm out here working the meadows I try not to think about the world. It has changed beyond anything I could have imagined, so I put my own prejudices and politics aside for a little while, and continue singing more Mason, a great tune about how to disagree, 'Let's just leave it alone, because we can't see eye to eye.”

' Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County