Here's a little small-town story for all you big city bloggers out there.


The Big Rock Plowing Match was held this weekend.

What's a plowing match, you ask? Well, a bunch of local farmers pull out their tractors, both modern and antique (the antiques are more fun) and plow a certain number of rows back and forth, all attempting to have the cleanest, straightest rows.

It's like speech team for farmers. It has no real point, but it gives the participants a chance to compete in a medium where there usually is no competition.

My family has plowed in it off an on for many years, and this year my two cousins Jake and Ben were the family reps in the 2005 edition.



Have I ever plowed in the match? Nope. I know how to plow, and have done it a few times, and can tell you what Covering Your Trash means, what a one-bottom plow is versus a two-bottom plow, and why Nothing Runs Like a Deere.

But I'm not a farmer. I'm a generation removed from such things, but it's still in my blood, even though I always show up late to this thing, if at all.

It makes me incredibly proud, though, to see my young cousins on top of the D or the B or whatever happens to be working that year (it wasn't the D), staring down at the ground, making sure that the blade of the plow is turning over the soil in just the right way, covering all of the old stalks and grasses that were left over from last year's harvest (that's basically what covering your trash is.)



In the end, the plowing match is one of the last remaining links to a family history that is as rich as the Midwestern soil that gets covered up by subdivisions and gas stations more and more every day around here. We take it seriously, and speak in reverential tones about the old farm in Naperville and the Wheatland Township Plowing Match where our fathers competed so long ago.

I don't know how Ben and Jake did this weekend, and I'm sure Hamish will inform us in the comments tomorrow, but bravo to them both, and their dear father, who has passed on to his sons what he learned from his father, who learned it from the fathers and fathers of all my family's generations.