The Auction
The auction sale is over,
So what is left to say?
Some junk brought ten times its worth,
Some good stuff we gave away.
When we tallied up the dollars
We didn’t feel too bad.
But I couldn’t help,
When the smoke all cleared,
To feel a little sad.
In the quiet time that lingered
With the noise all left behind,
When I stopped and thought of what was gone
These thoughts ran through my mind.
For 50 years I worked the ground,
I cleared and broke the soil.
I plowed and disced, combined and hayed,
And it never seemed like toil.
I thought of that hard used iron,
The few dollars that it brought,
And I’d have to say in an honest way,
It didn’t owe me a lot.
That old green plow with its wore down shares,
Just took it as it came;
Good or bad, rocks or stumps
It plowed it just the same.
The tandem disc with the notched front gangs,
That cut the turned up ground,
Those diamond harrows hooked on behind,
That leveled and packed it down.
The double disc drill that bumped along,
And metered out the grain,
The fields we seeded that hot, dry year
When we never did get rain.
Those two old John Deere tractors
When the closing bid came in
It was mighty hard to see ‘em go,
Like sellin’ off a friend.
To break the bond that time had sealed
Through heat and cold and rain,
All those years in the same old seat,
That will never come again.
But there’s a time for new things, boys,
A time when change must come,
A time to carpet bowl and golf,
In the Arizona sun.
But its hard to quit
(And I might not yet),
‘cause I’ve enjoyed the run.
And though I never got rich farmin’ boys,
I sure had lots of fun.
By Bob Mumford
Little Fort B.C.
