Disk Harrow

Day 146: Once a year, the fellow who owns the pasture across the road reassembles this old disk harrow and makes two or three passes up close to the brush line, a swath no more than twenty feet wide. I assume he's creating a fire break. He's certainly not doing it as a means of weed control because the undisked land sprouts up with thousands of Canada thistles which are invariably allowed to go to seed. The disk sits idle for the rest of the year, seldom in the same location. It is as if the plowman says to himself, "Okay, that's it. I've had enough," and drops his task whenever the mood strikes him. Since last summer, the machinery has been at the far end of the pasture, and until today, I had never bothered to photograph it.