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.

December

exam desks line gymnasiums

ready recipients of regurgitated knowledge

students chatter somberly

twiddling pencils

snowfall warnings

snowfall

white powder dogs play in while

owners shovel

hushed shush of car tires

squishing past

playing dogs and

shoveling owners

Any month can be cruel. But November has to be one of the top contenders, for its lack of redeeming features. The beautiful colour and crisp clear days of October are just a memory by the time November shows up. November toys with one, one minute seeming like September or October and then just as quickly mimicking the worst of December or January minus the snow. Which isn't to say November can't have snow, oh no, but it is common for it to come as sleet or hail or some other unpleasant manifestation of the white stuff that gives all the grief - slippery roads, winter gear, unhappy pedestrians - with none of the joy and beauty of snowfall. November is truly the cruelest month.

January

It was cold outside. Very very cold. It was in fact one of those nights when the sky stretches up up up to eternity and the star blink coldly down. There was no moon. Throughout the house the night cold pushed bitter fingers through each window as I walked past. Our two wood stoves pushed heat back and the coziness of the indoors was only exacerbated by the bitterness outside. Night chores were done, dinner was long past and I was ensconsed in a comfy armchair, legs dangling over one arm, reading. But I was also aware that I had to pee. And the urge to pee was fast becoming something I could not ignore.

Until I was 13 this cold night air and the need to use a washroom were two utterly disconnected things, but now I was living in a century farmhouse that only had warm water running in the kitchen when the stove was well on. The bathroom was, in fact, an outhouse, and I needed to go. Cold or not, I was going to have to go outside.

Slowly and yet with a mounting sense of urgency I put on my boots, scarf, tuque, mittens and thick down coat. I was as ready as I was going to be. I stepped outside, my chest constricting with the first inbreath of the icy night air. The house lights dropped behind me but I knew where I was going. The white outhouse gleamed in the starlight, pointing the way.

It was only when I get to the outhouse that the full awfulness of the situation became understood. Despite my urgency, I had put all my layers of clothing on. Sweater, followed by a scarf and then thick coat over all. However, what I had not remembered was the pair of overalls I was wearing under everything else. Overalls that could not be pulled down to do the necessary.

It took me a long time to get warm again once I was back in the house, even with both stoves pumping out heat. I knew that I would never again forget the lesson I had learned that night. Never, ever, go to the outhouse on a cold winter night with overalls under everything!!

How can I feel so competent some of the time and so incompetent other times? Wouldn't life be grand if it were just one easy road from competency to competence! :) Okay so I dream. But it is a worthy dream. Now if I'm dreaming maybe if I could just try to dream myself out of being a nag with the boys too ...

Alex will be 11 on the 21st of September. Eleven years ago now I was sooo pregnant and unsure of what was to come. Ohh wow, now there is a veritable 'if I knew then what I know now' kind of scenario.

hugs all