Haying

As a farmer there is a pattern, a rhythm to your life that is unavoidable. Much of it is tied to the rhythm of the year, the change in the seasons and things that have to be done when they have to be done. Haying is a prime example. Haying happens when it is hot; full summer, with its long hot days, not a whisper of the fall that is to come. Haying happens when the timothy grass is long and lush, fed by days of sunshine and rain, ready to be cut. The army jeep is pulled out and gotten serviceable, our version of a tractor – hey don’t knock it, at least it has brakes that work! –the mower teeth sharpened. Into the field, bumpety bump, and down goes the mower arm, scything through the grass hundreds of times faster than the original scythe could.

Then, an anxious time as one hopes and prays that the rain – normally much heralded for its gentle feeding of the garden – stay away as the grass dries on the fields. Then! To work! A great bustle of activity as one gets in to drive (usually father), two stand in the back of the open backed jeep with pitchforks to pack the hay down and some walk behind the rake to pick up errant bits of hay and shepherd them into the truck. The work begins. Hot prickly musty work as the hay rolls inevitably into the truck and another rhythm establishes itself. One person towards the back of the truck forking the hay in, and the other further back, tramping it down as it comes in. The success of the tramping is measured by how high the load can be piled. The higher the load the fewer the trips.

Hay seed gets in everything! Below the breasts, down the back, into the underwear, everything becomes scratchy and itchy. Sweat burns as it drips down off the forehead, into the dry sweet smelling hay. Occasionally a halt is called, lemonade and food shared around. Then, back to the tamping down of hay, tamp tamp tamp until the load is precarious and high, towering above the roof of the jeep, hay mounded, sloping outward until the pitchforks become a necessary tool to stay on top of the load.

Bounce bounce the truck ponders its way back towards the barn, everyone sighs, movement stills, hay prickles make their fierce announcement of their presence. The barn slowly fills with the fragrance of summer, a reminder in the months to come of the sunshine and heat of late July.

Writing

Can it ever be perfect? Can I make a sentence/paragraph/page turn in such a way as to allow me the writer to feel that sense of wonder - did I do that? - a wonder which is not to be marred later by a re-reading and the oft-inevitable realization that something could have been improved.

Unlike the ephemeral arts - music, cooking - writing lingers, lurking, to shame us into that embarrassed realization that what at first blush seemed wonderful - nay marvelous - is in fact only mediocre or ordinary. That sentence that seemed so sharp and well crafted seems clunky and rough, an approximation of a thought rather than the crystallization of one.

Writing is a fierce mistress and an unforgiving one. So why write?

For a giggle - and a writing contest

Her appetent appetite was galvanized by the threat of
starvation as the barbeque charred into coal; worse, her innately
plebian character was mightily affronted by the mendacious toadies at
that unctuous event.

Who is that man? What is he really doing? What's in the darkness?

So my last post generated these questions from a gentle reader. :) I'll elaborate. The man is short - almost troll-like in appearance, with long scraggly grey hair and constant grey stubble no matter how recently he shaved. He has been doing this job for as long as he can remember, learning at the knees of his dad who did the job before him and his grandfather before that. But he is lonely - there being no son to follow in his footsteps, so he walks around in his room, feet making tap-tap-tap noises as he walks, turning the lights on at dusk and off at dawn. He goes outside as little as possible during the day as too much light makes him uncomfortable as does too much sky. In the corner of his room there is a cot where he sleeps.

The darkness has monsters. His job is to keep them at bay by turning the lights on when they start to stir, and turn them off again when sun's early light begins to chase them back to their hidey-holes for another day.

I was young when we lived in Toronto - not quite 13 when we left, and I had some quite interesting theories about the world around me. One of these, I still remember with a smile to this day. I needed to understand why it was that whole banks of streetlights came on at the same time. So I figured out that there was a room somewhere in downtown Toronto - a really big room - with nothing in it but rows and rows of switches on the wall. And there was a older man working there with a long stick that had an iron blade attached to it so it looked kind of like a really big T. His job was solely to walk about turning on banks of switches so that an entire street would light up at the same time.

It made sense then! :)

I also remember realizing that it was possible for it to be raining somewhere and not raining somewhere else! This realization didn't happen until after I moved to NB and I had the experience of being able to look over the countryside and see the rain falling but not being rained on. When one is small and lives in a city it is very hard to get that perspective!

I saw the movie Julie and Julia last night and while it made me itch to own another impossible cookbook (I already own the "Joy of Cooking"), it also made me realize how much I, too, yearn to have followers ... to be read by others ... to know that others are reading and appreciating my writing! It has been said that writing is a solitary art. How true.