A collection of artwork curated for the country home. Tractors, barns, scenes from an honest, simpler lifestyle.
The collection includes over 200 photographs and artwork from the New England area including Vermont and New Hampshire, rural, country scenes of a life that is disappearing and unknown to many today. Fresh eggs, maple syrup, homemade pies and the scent of fresh cut hay and the sounds of dairy cows walking up to the old barn. www.edwardfielding.com
Enjoy the images and poetry:
There once was a man from up Nord
Who invariably could be found on a Ford.
No Allis, no Deering, no Farmalls or Cases
And the Green ones he truely abhorred.
When he wasn’t fixing he was at YT mixing
with all of the great folks on the boards.
There once was a farmer named rand.
He bought a tractor one day second hand.
He started to curse when it hung in reverse.
And unplowed an acre of land.
The tractor stands frozen – an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.It defied flesh and won’t start.
Hands are like wounds already
Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable
As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.
I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it
The copse hisses – capitulates miserably
In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,
A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over
Towards plantations Eastward.
All the time the tractor is sinking
Through the degrees, deepening
Into its hell of ice.The starting lever
Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.
The battery is alive – but like a lamb
Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother –
While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites
With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined
In one solid lump.I squirt commercial sure-fire
Down the black throat – it just coughs.
It ridicules me – a trap of iron stupidity
I’ve stepped into. I drive the battery
As if I were hammering and hammering
The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer
And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly
Into happy life.And stands
Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly
Like a demon demonstrating
A more-than-usually-complete materialization –
Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity
With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion
Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon
Shouting Where Where?Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels
Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,
Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.
The blind and vibrating condemned obedience
Of iron to the cruelty of iron,
Wheels screeched out of their night-locks –Fingers
Among the tormented
Tonnage and burning of ironEyes
Weeping in the wind of chloroformAnd the tractor, streaming with sweat,
Raging and trembling and rejoicing.
“I bought an old tractor all dusty and worn
Knew nothing about her just the year she was born
I washed her and greased her and painted her red
Now she lives happily right here in my shed.”
This old tractor comes to visit a hay meadow near my home twice a summer to cut the hay. Who knows how long this old work horse has been in service. These machines sit outside in the weather half the time but they seem to live forever.
So, out back lie iron hunks of metal
That once was the heart of the farm.
Tractors and old trucks in their former glory
Just waiting to be restored and remind us of their story.Part of a poem by Cindy Ladage – http://www.cowboypoetry.com/cindyladage.htm
Artwork for the farming themed home or a reminder of the simpler life for city folk: