I couldn’t live here without my Kubota! (No, I do not sell Kubota tractors.) When my wife and I moved to Hampton eight years ago, I was a healthy 65-year-old man. Now I am an aging 73-year-old man who realizes that the only reason we can live in our converted 130-year-old barn on our hillside overlooking the valley below is our trusty BX24 Kubota tractor.

It sounds somewhat silly. Why would a small tractor with a bucket loader and backhoe make any difference? When I was younger, I could bend my knees, lift a 454 Chevy block onto the workbench of my automotive machine shop, and set it up for boring. The next moment, I could pick up the heavy cast iron heads for the big block Chevy, lean over the side of my cylinder head grinding machine and locate the head to be surface ground. No problem! Today, when my wife hands me a new jar of peanut butter, I must brace my body against the counter, grit my teeth, grasp the jar with both hands and make a gigantic physical grunting sound as I attempt to free the lid from the jar. In the end, the effort expended may or may not get us to the peanut butter waiting within. I would hand the jar to my grandson, who twists the lid off with youthful ease. Growing old gracefully is not in my vocabulary.

When we arrived in Hampton, we fell in love with the 130-year- old converted barn, perched on a hillside, down a steep 300’ driveway, and overlooking a steeper hill above the Little River Valley. If you have heard the expression “Love is blind,” you can appreciate how we missed the “steep driveway, house perched on a hillside, overlooking a steep hill above the valley floor.” We did not buy the house with snow on the ground. By that February, we had two blizzards in a row and no practical way to clear the snow from our driveway. We then slowly realized how vulnerable we were in our “house on a hillside.”

Within a year or so, we purchased a Kubota tractor from a new friend, believing this would help with our snow removal problem. It helped immensely. Soon, the grand total of tractor possibilities became apparent as I used it for many projects unrelated to snow removal. The tractor came with a forklift attachment for the bucket. When we began to build things in the back of the house, Home Depot would drop off the heavy wood in front of the house, and I would bring it down the hill with my “forklift.” As large trees came down in our woodlot, I could cut up the tree, stack the wood in the waiting bucket, and bring the load up to the woodshed to be split. I used the backhoe to dig trenches for neighbors, carve out a flat area to build our post and beam shed, and even dig a grave for one of our goats in the dead of winter.

After buying a few attachments that clamped to the bucket, I found I could lift massive logs with a pincher device hanging down from the front of the bucket. I could attach a trailer ball onto the bucket and easily move any one of our many trailers around our steep, hilly yard with ease. An eye attachment for the bucket allowed me to lift my big motorcycle out of the mud and into the workshop. The forklift attachment made hauling multiple bales of straw or hay to the storage an easy process. Once I needed to move an entire Quonset-style tent frame to the backyard. I simply parked the tractor under the structure, raised the back with the backhoe, raised the front with the bucket, tied it onto the tractor, and motored off down the hill to find a flat spot to place it on. I can’t remember the number of large rocks I have moved with the little tractor, but there have been a bunch. Our back hill was full of thorny bushes that defied the use of weed-whackers or lawn mowers. After watching a cooking show where the cook sliced celery with her magic knife, I sharpened the edge of the bucket, positioned the tractor at the top of the hill, and drove downhill with the bucket floating. Viola, I cleanly sliced off every thorny bush I met.

When we began to organize the barn raising of our post and beam structure, I was able to pile the heavy beams in neat piles in order of assembly. When it came time to raise the “bents” of the structure, I raised the bucket high off to the end, connected the lifting eye to the bucket, and used a block and tackle to lift the heavy three bents one at a time.

In short, I am the king of the hill using my trusty Kubota. I am the very model of a very savvy farmer who can do any chore around the farm without batting an eye. Sitting high on my worn-out tractor seat, I am an orange superman, able to lift tall logs with a single pull of a handle. I am a master of all I survey in my backyard.

Without my Kubota, I am but a 73- year-old grandfather in search of his grandson to open a jar of crunchy peanut butter.

 Jamie Boss