the Hay Wagon

The hay arrived, of course, just as Bev was driving to Southwest Harbor, and I had the great idea of putting it up myself...I had the conveyer, right? Five bales on the conveyer, run upstairs, unload the bales, run downstairs, 5 on the conveyer.

There is something about the whole process of neighbor Larry cutting the hay. I imagined him on his beautiful 1952 McCormick, cutting and raking hay on a tractor that had been cutting hay longer than I've been alive, and Larry keeping it running, with the other equipment, day after day, when the mowing season arrives.

How many kids know how this works? Hay cut and baled, hauled to a local barn for the livestock to eat during the winter, in our case goats, put into the hayloft and stacked by hand. Do they know what the hayloft smells like on a winter's day when it is not so cold to stifle the smell--it is like a glimpse of late Spring, if you close your eyes. Thet don't know how excited the goats get to try something new, to taste the new hay, even though it comes from land less than two miles down the road.

Many bales had fuzzy seed pods, and I wondered what plant these were from. I imagined the seeds wintering over in the hayloft, to be scattered on the stall floor, as the hay is pulled out of the manger by hungry goats. It will get buried again beneath more layers of dropped and trampled hay until Spring, when the stall is cleaned out. The soiled hay will get piled up alongside the barnyard fence, where it will slowly compost. If that seed lands just right, and many do, it will find the Spring sunlight, composting soil and water, and come back to life.

How does this happen I wonder, and does Larry the McCormick driver cut hay year after year because he knows he is a vital part of this cycle of regermination and eating, growing, cutting, composting, rebirth... does anything really die after all?