"I want you to live." Did I ever tell you that story? The line is part of our family's oral tradition and it brings a smile and a giggle and a head shake to my three boys (now three men). The year of my divorce I bought my much loved old farm house. Built in 1837 it is solid and simple and is surrounded by an acre and a half of sandy, gravelly dirt pushed here thousands of years ago by a mile high glacier which put its brakes on and melted to form Walnut Creek, which is behind the house, and Lake Erie which is at the bottom of the hill. Across the street, now, is the upscale development which caused my estate value to triple.

The man who owned the house had just gone through a divorce and sold it, privately, at rock bottom price because he didn't want to clean it or remove the detritus of his marriage. I was left with a magnificent solid mahogany dresser, circa 1800, closets full of seventies men's clothes, a basement that required a high tech hygiene breathing device because of the moldy freezer covered with six inches of ice and filled with sold blocks of frozen dinosaur steaks. Just kidding about the dinosaur. And, in the shed out back was an old riding lawn tractor. My friend the tractor.

We moved into the house the first week in December. I got the tractor running in June after removing several nests of mice replete with adorable pink fingerlings, (I tucked them back into the shed snuggled inside coffee cans),wrapping electrical tape around this wire and that, and attaching a hemostat to connect another severed connection. It worked! It roared and smoked and rattled every bone in my body as it lunged forward at its only speed, fast! Its brakes wouldn't lock and, once, I bailed off it in the knick of time before it went backwards down a hill behind the house, the blades continuing to whirl at cole slaw speed, but it made short work of a huge and unruly lawn, and money was skimpy those years. Every spring and all summer found me with a most feminine tool kit of tweezers and squeezers and pullers and pounders, wire and tapes of every color, derusters, oil squirters and spark plugs, performing miracle healings on my friend, the tractor.

One summer, on Saturday morning, early, while my three sons were sleeping, I began to mow the lawn. Just in front of the window of the downstairs bedroom where my oldest son slept the tractor burst into flames. My first thought was that if it exploded it would injure my kids and start the house on fire. I ran, screaming, into the house "Get out of the house. Stand out back on the porch. NOW!" The sounds of feet hitting floor thundered. By the time I got downstairs and outside, my oldest son had unraveled the four lengths of hose needed to water flowers in the perimeter gardens and was moving around the side of the house to extinguish the blaze. I ripped the hose out of his hands to his utter astonishment and screamed, "Get behind the house. I'll do this, it could still explode. I WANT YOU TO LIVE!"

All three of my sons, bare chested, bare footed, wearing only pants, short or long, in the face of what looked to me like incredible danger, cracked up and howled. They bent forward and held their stomachs laughing. They repeated over and over, using my exact intonation, 'I want you to LIVE! I want you to LIVE!"

The fire was already out. My oldest son, with the gene that all males seem to be born with, perused the machinery of the tractor, found the problem, a 'gas spill on a hot block' which sounded to me like a gas spill onto a blagada de flob. I don't get machinery. The workings. I can look at something and see what might reconnect severed parts, and I am absolutely marvelous at boo boos and wounds and stitches and blood, but machinery? Don't get it.

That line, for my sons, is my descriptor. Not too bad.

(correlates: PrivateCommunication, Extraordinary Gentlemen, MountWhitney, ...)