First off, let me just say that while I’m not completely opposed to change, it sometimes comes like swallowing cod liver oil for those of us who tend to be creatures of habit.

So when my husband approached me and said he thought we should get a different tractor to put on the grain cart this year, the hair on my toe knuckles began to bristle up.

“That tractor is getting pretty old for what we’re asking it to do,” he reasoned.

I began to wonder what he would do with me when he decided I was getting too old to run our equipment as well. Some days, when things are “a swing and a miss” out in the field, it’s on my prayer list.

The very thought of learning all the ropes of a new or different tractor can seem almost electrifying to someone of any gender starting from the kindergarten years and coming up on — or including — their childbearing years. But learning it as someone who is closer to discounted breakfast pancakes than to kindergarten round-up, it can seem like stepping into the “Twilight Zone.”

My husband doesn’t buy tractors willy-nilly. And he doesn’t purchase even a slinky unless he absolutely needs it. So when he uttered the words “different tractor” to me, I knew he meant business.

It would also mean new business for me.

One day, right there in the yard it stood — a new (to us) tractor — one a little newer than the one on which I had learned and honed the skill. It was electrifying, if only until my husband invited me to climb up into it and learn how to run it.

As he was showing me all the horns and whistles, and assuring me that it would be so much nicer to run than the other one that I had come to think of as my fourth child (one that carried me, instead of the other way around), I’m certain my eyes had those “spinners” in them that Wile E. Coyote used to get when he was coldcocked.

I froze at the very thought of having to learn how to run everything from a monitor and a spinner on a throttle lever. I think I heard some of the things my husband was telling me.

Mostly, when I step into the driver’s seat of some piece of new equipment, I just want to know how to stop it.

That’s it.

This time, I’m thinking — why do we have to get some different tractor when I can run the other one just fine? After all, it’s the same reason I haven’t traded my husband in for a different one — I already know how to run him. Doesn’t efficiency count for anything anymore?

My reasoning was overruled, and there I was in the cab of the newer tractor at the start of harvest time. Our son asked me how I liked it, and while it wasn’t surfacing as the worst thing in the world, it wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated, either. I said I didn’t really get some things about it, and he offered to give me some pointers.

So one morning while harvesting he climbed into the cab, reached over in front of me and ran the gears and levers as we went, and explained to me some of the mechanics.

“If you set the speed here to the speed of the combine, it will automatically go to that speed every time when you push this (lever) up. And when Dad says you aren’t running at the right speed, you can tell him he’s wrong,” he said with a wry look and a half-grin.

Well what’s not to like about that?

Was he telling me that I could now be reprimanded for something other than going too fast or too slow? Surely now it would only be a matter of being a row too close or too far over.

After that brief tutorial it seemed easier to climb in and feel like the tractor gods were aligning, and that they weren’t actually voo-doo dolls in drag.

What it actually did was to ensure I would be sitting in that cab for harvests to come.

I’m pretty sure the ghosts of Wile E. Coyote or Rod Serling are lurking somewhere in that cab.

Karen Schwaller writes from her grain and livestock farm near Milford, Iowa. She can be reached at kschwaller@evertek.net