For Dad

I hate it when people say things like Elvis would have been 65 (don't correct me - I don't really care) if he'd lived, but I'm going to say it anyway. My Dad would have been 73 yesterday, if he had lived, which he rather inconveniently didn't.
He loved this time of year. He started out in farming at the hiring fairs in Carlisle and working on his uncles farm in the Lakes and eventually got his own farm tenancy, taking fancy new haymaking ways up into the Pennines. He loved machinery and if there was a new forager or baler on the market he had to have it, regardless of whether or not the farm could pay for it. He never went on holiday in his life, claiming that the few weeks he spent driving combine harvesters for contractors in the Eden Valley were his holiday.
He never knew that I had to leave Cumbria (which sounds far more intriguing than it is), but he would have been a regular visitor to our new home. Not to me, but to bother the farmer that's currently making silage in the fields around our house.
I've been leaning on my garden gate watching them with their new tractors and huge forager, all just managing to squeeze through the gateways that were clearly not designed for machinery of this nature. As I write there is a mower (front & rear) cutting down the grass, another tractor puttting into huge rows, the forager chopping & collecting it all up and 3 tractors & trailers following it round and taking the grass to the silage pit where another massive tractor is buckraking it at heights & angles that are making me very nervous.
They started at about 5pm and I'm pretty confident they'll have the lot down before dark.
As I stood in quiet amazement watching them I wondered if Dad was with me. And then I thought "Nah - he'll on the forager playing with the air conditioning."

PS - Yes that's a Toon Army sticker on the tractor