On a random afternoon while meandering down a side street in Durant, Oklahoma, I discovered a graveyard. The headstones read Farmall, Allis Chalmers and John Deere. Tombs filled with flywheels and pistons. I knocked on the caretaker’s door. Troy emerged, and after a brief introduction, he shared his plans to resurrect them. But mortality had interrupted those plans as it often does. His son and daughter had both died this past year—one of cancer, the other in a freak accident. Sadness choked his eyes.
The tractors will eventually be plowed over by rust and time, but that will be long after we’re gone.