Learning To Drive, Country Style

You can't do this in East Toronto: City girl driving the tractor! 

When I first moved here to rural Nova Scotia, Dwayne tried to teach me to drive his big blue Chev truck. It wasn't a new truck; I think it was a 94 or 95, so he considered it delicate, and didn't want it broken. New or old, he still would have freaked out about my handling it.
As in, lurching all over the place and stalling the truck. I think I got two attempts at driving it, before he hauled me out of the driver's seat and said I was going to "break" his truck.

Yeesh.

I've been bugging him about the tractor, wanting to learn to drive it and use the loader. After all, this is how country-raised kids learn to drive: They hop up on tractors when they're seven or eight and listen and watch, then they get to help with some task, and from there it's quick steps to driving the tractor by themselves by the time they're 12 years old.
Driving my friend's brother's TransAm through Pugwash at the age of 15 doesn't really count (see Field Notes for the whole story...) so I'm determined to be able to work the tractor, to haul dirt and gravel and plow snow, as soon as possible. Part of this determination comes from my innate practicality: Dwayne had a stroke. He's recovered but it's a reminder that anything can happen at any moment.

As if any of us needs a reminder.

I've found resistance to change, and reality, creates more problems than it prevents, so I want to be able to do as much of the work around this property as possible JUST IN CASE. Because you never know what could happen on a normal Sunday evening while you're watching a "Big Bang Theory" rerun.

What's hilarious about my learning to drive the tractor is I have my ex-husband to thank for the success of yesterday's lesson.
Many, many years ago, when I had first moved to Vancouver, my car was stolen and his truck was a standard. So early on a Sunday morning, we went out to a huge, empty parking lot at UBC to practice. I'd barely warmed the driver seat and lurched forward when a car came. It was miles away, there was no way I'd come close to it, but my then-husband shouted, "Stop!" anyway. 
I jammed my foot on the brake. The truck stalled.
He got mad and that was the end of my lesson. I never learned to drive his truck, and a few weeks later, the police found my car.

But this is what I learned: CLUTCH, BRAKE. If you want an automatic driver to stop when they are driving a standard, you need to shout "Clutch! Brake!" at them.
Now, I knew this when trying to learn to drive the big blue Chev but you change gears A LOT in a truck and I couldn't coordinate my feet and my hands and my brain. There was simply too much clutching, and when you're learning, you do everything slowly and after thinking it through.
Husband driving teachers have no patience with that.
The tractor, on the other hand, is a different story. I don't need to go very fast so there are no gears to change, expect from Forward, Neutral and Reverse. And it turns out, I don't even need to use the brake very much.

I've got this, you guys! I know how to drive the tractor. I can back up! I can go forward!
I still lurch, however, but hopefully that will smooth itself out as I get the feel for the clutch, and grow my left leg about four inches. It would be nice not to slide off the tractor seat every time I let the clutch out.
The trick is to drive the tractor as much as possible so I remember how. So expect to see me puttering up and down the driveway, backing up, lurching forward every day.

Until the first snowfall... then the loader lessons begin...

Tractor selfie! Then Dwayne took my phone away.