MY SUBject today is haying in These titles mean nothing.

Emphasis on small bales.

I think I did almost all of my hay handling before I started writing on line. It happened after we moved back in 1975 and before we got our first big hay baler in ....... well that’s the problem. I don’t know what we got the first big baler. Probably sometime near the end of the 1980s. We must have had a good ten years of stacking and unstacking hay. I always felt good making hay. It seemed real and sweaty and close to nature. It also made us a family.

I wrote a poem once called making hay on rented land. I searched through the three places I write on line that have search capability but did not find it. I suppose it’s in a notebook somewhere, but that’s way too much work.

I can tell you why I wrote the poem though. Rending land, and farming it, especially hay which is so personal and labor intensive, is a really special thing. There is land you own, land that has been in various forms of the family - and that is special because in a sense - not totally, no one ever really owns anything - it does have a history that parallels your own life. This is the piece so and so bought and paid for with difficulty and so and so hung onto, again with difficulty, and now it’s growing hay for you to harvest.

Every field is special. It has a shape and a border and a set of views that vary with the time of year and the direction you look. Fields are shared with nature - hawks fly over, swallows as well, Rabbits and deer pasture. The sky is a big lid, sometimes blue, sometimes cloudy, sometimes threatening and then delivering storms.

Being able to hay on rented land is like a trip to Europe. The view is different. The fields have different shapes and contours. And the views are exotically glamorous. You’re always grateful to have a new place to work, to share the land’s specialness with those who do own it.

You work with your family. You work with the machinery that all has stories. Things break, Things get fixed. Things work right. There is pattern to loading small bales on a wagon. I asked Jim last night if he could remember how we did it and he was vague. I thought this morning he might have left me a diagram. It’s a little like laying brick, the pattern varies by layer. It’s important to have a balanced load. When I was stacking on a wagon I my loads would tend to get crooked. They were mother lodes. There was a year we had too much hay to put inside the barns and we made outdoor wedding cake stacks of bales.

About half way through our small bale era we got a thrower baler that would punch the bales out of the chute and into a catcher wagon. That technological advance cut bale handling in half. All was left was unloading the mushed up wagons of bales at the barn. It was like doing a crossword puzzle. Easy bales, hard bales. Sometimes one hard bale lead to several easy ones. One day Dale and I were unloading what seemed like many wagon loads of hay. We were maybe a third done with the third wagon. I asked him how many he thought were left on the wagon, He said he didn’t know. Well I know he didn’t know. But he could guess. No guess. So I said one hundred and twenty two. So we started counting the bales as we put them on the slide that lead to the elevator. And guess what? There were 122 bales left on the wagon. Dale is now a chiropractor. His lovely wife, the mother of his two lovely daughters died this spring of cancer. How can those kind of things happen? I do not know.

I miss haying. It had such a rhythm for the summer. You kept at it. You mowed, you raked, you baled, you staked and hauled and unloaded. You drank ice water from the semi-frozen gallon milk jug. When it melted it was warm and still so good.
The sun on your shoulders. The itchiness. The almost sore muscles. The unity of getting it done. Sunsets. Thunderstorms. Roads through the woods to fields on high ridges. The hot hot barn that I almost always managed to avoid. The broken bales you either fed back in to the unbaled windrow or took out into the pasture for the cows and calves. The smell. Hay has this orchestra of scents that all manage to make you happy. The color, the texture, the quality of the hay. It varies my friend. But it makes us happy, not matter what. Those were the summers.