He said it was a McCormick-Deering, “and you’d do eight rows. There’s about a thousand ways you could adjust these things to get the furrows turned just right. They would do what the old people called ‘pretty work.’ They’d say, ‘That’s pretty work.’” I was quite taken with that. These days, who among us can say with any regularity, “That’s pretty work”? The fact that most of what we do in modern America doesn’t fall into that category is precisely what he’s driving at in his writing. You know who does get to say it? The kids who went to vocational school. The welder, the seamstress, the
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