Proof that poetry is found in the homeliest places - in this case a young girl riding the wheel of a John Deere thresher, her mother a few feet and a thousand miles away. (What that woman is sitting on, I can’t say - did threshers have rumble seats?) This picture has haunted me since I found it; the original is only 2 inches by 5 inches, and blown up it seems like a door that opens directly to that day. You can feel the sun, the breeze, smell the fields - and if you’ve ever done any threshing, you can feel the grit of the crops covering every inch of your skin.

In those days, children were allowed to play around hideously spiky machinery, it seems.