Early this summer, I drove to the local church, hoping to find a teen-aged boy to mow my lawns. Three people were weeding the church garden. I approached a solid middle-aged woman who had a warm, open face. “I'll do it!” she said immediately. Raised in the country, she knows how to run farm machinery, how to care for animals and how to take on most any job, no matter what it is. She steps into the work, not away from it! She now chooses to work in homes rather than in an office.

She has taught me to approach machinery with more confidence. With equipment, I know how to turn a machine on and off; I know how to fill the tank, and I know how to check the oil. Aside from that, I usually call a man to ask for help. When a diesel tractor runs out of fuel, one simply cannot fill the tank; one has to bleed the fuel line of air before the engine will start again.

Two or three times, I have run out of fuel. Do I feel embarrassed that I have run out of fuel and that I cannot bleed the engine myself? Yes, but then I call the local tractor mechanic. He comes obligingly when he can. In less than five minutes, for a reasonable charge, he bleeds the line and starts the engine. The mechanic's son came the last time. He showed me the two nuts to turn to bleed the line.

Last Tuesday, I heard the cough, cough, wheeze of my New Holland tractor: the sound it makes just before it runs out of diesel fuel. My assistant had started the tractor, not knowing that the fuel tank was empty when the fuel gauge read one-fourth tank.

“We're not calling the mechanic,” she said. “ We can do this.” I knew roughly where the two screws were. I pulled out the owner's manual. I confessed that I had trouble matching the diagram with the engine in front of us. She looked at the manual; she looked at the engine; she identified the two nuts. We got pliers, and subsequently a socket wrench. “It needs an 11/16 inch socket,” she said with confidence. She tried again. The nut was still tight.

“Maybe it is a banjo nut,” she conjectured. She called her husband, a mechanic. He confirmed that it was a banjo nut, a nut that loosens to the right, not the left. Within a minute, she loosened the nut. I turned the key again; the engine started, then stalled. It started and stalled. We pushed the throttle up and down. On the third time, the engine started and stayed on. We slapped our hands together in triumph, “Girl Power!” I was thrilled! We had done it together!

She drove to the gooseberry plants, bushes about the size of raspberries with long, thorny canes. I wrapped the logging chain around the base of each plant, my face almost touching the thorns. When I gave the signal, she backed up the tractor and easily pulled the plants out of the moist soil. She threw them into a cart while I began working on the next plant. We sweat profusely in the heat, the sun and the humidity. We stuck with it and got a tough job done together.

Early this summer, a neighbor helped me change a flat tire on my Chevy Silverado. She matched the diagram with the machinery. I lent my strength to loosen the bolts on the tire. Was it a woman thing, I questioned? Are women able to help other women more easily than men are? No, she responded. Her husband had done the work for her. After he died, a sweetheart happily worked along beside her. A friend gives me carpentry advice. “Call me anytime,” he says. Then he talks me through a job.

When he is here on the farm, though, he imagines that I can do work far beyond my skill or strength. I am reluctant to share how inept I feel. That is exactly where I start with a woman, then, I step with her into the work. Have you experienced that dynamic too? Girl power is great!