Two days ago, I was out by the road digging a hole for our mailbox.

Along comes a guy on a tractor. The tractor was built in maybe the 1960s. It had no cab, and was loud, as tractors are. Attached to the back was a mower. It had long since lost any part of paint that was on it, and appeared to be made of rust.

The farmer driving this tractor was wearing a bluetooth earpiece for his cellphone.

(I don’t think there would be any way to use a phone while driving that tractor due to the noise, but hey.)

Now, the rest of the story…

This being rural Kansas, the farmer saw me and stopped to chat, turning off the tractor first, of course. He introduced himself as “that crazy guy from south of town”, and of course had a pretty good idea of who I was. After all, he’s lived around here for decades and knew my grandpa.

I told him why I was digging the hole for the mailbox. There’s going to be a second house down our mile, so now the post office will actually deliver to a mailbox at our driveway, rather than one almost a mile away. I thought he looked confused, so I pointed down the road and said that’s our mailbox on the corner.

“Oh, I know. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I knew when you moved in because I checked your mailbox one day and it didn’t have 40-year-old ads piling up anymore.”

We chatted a few more minutes, about the neighbor’s goats, how annoying it is that he can’t get DSL, why he wishes he could still use DOS instead of Windows. Then he went off towards home.

He had stopped his tractor in the middle of the road. But it wasn’t a problem. Nobody drove by that whole time anyway.