On a recent trip home from Pennsylvania to visit our two daughters and their husbands, we passed several state road workers mowing the sides of the roads. The wafting scent of mowed grass transported my thoughts back to being young and living on farms in Westville and Trout River.
In the summertime, the first cut of hay had a special scent, hard to describe unless you've experienced it. Sometimes it would be clover, sometimes sweet grass, very pleasing. There is a difference in the smell.
After the cut, Dad would bale the hay. Our hired hand would walk alongside the tractor-drawn wagon and throw the bales up to my father, where he would stack them in a step-down pattern until the wagon was loaded and ready to head to the barn.
One of those times (I think I was about 10), I asked my father if I could drive. Big field, no problem, right? I had been practicing on the old Ford, a gray, four-wheeled tractor. A metal piece at my right hand was the speed. It went up and down, for fast and slow. There was a clutch under my left foot and a brake under my right foot. Simple enough!
We had about half a load on the wagon when my father motioned to move to the back section of the field. Thinking he wanted to get there a bit faster than we had been moving, I let the clutch out and moved the "speed stick" upward at the same time, a bit too much. The tractor jumped forward, and the wagon load of hay and my father fell backward. Realizing what was happening, I stomped on the brake, causing my father to end up on the floor of the wagon with the hay bales on top of him.
My father was the most patient man I have ever met. He stood up, pushed the hay bales aside and said, "That's good. Now do you think we could do it again, a little slower?"
It makes me smile now to think of it.
NO FEAR OF FALLING
When the haymow was full, it was the perfect place for a game of hide and seek. My friends Elaine and Lyle and I would head for "our playground" and have the time of our lives, hiding among the bales. We had been warned not to walk on the beams that squared off the sides of the haymow, but were we scared? No. I was feeling like a tightrope walker, looking at my feet, when Elaine yelled for me to watch out for the post ahead of me. I looked up and lost my balance just as she grabbed my hand, pulling me into the hay bales and saving me from a fall to the wooden barn floor so far below. Needless to say that cured me of walking the beams.
Eventually, we sold the farm because my father became ill. It was too hard for my mother to manage three children and all the chores, even with a hired man, when my father was in the hospital for a long time. But some of my sweetest days were spent growing up on the farm, where hard work (my parents') and a sense of accomplishment (so my father said) came at the end of the day. The simple act of grass being mowed or hay being baled allows me to revisit those childhood days over and over again, bringing a few moments of mental rest in such a busy world.
One last thought: Please be kind to each other. The world needs more kindness.
Susan Tobias lives in Plattsburgh with her husband, Toby. She has been a Press-Republican newsroom employee since 1977. The Tobiases have six children, 18 grandchildren and one great-grandchild. They enjoy traveling to Maine and Colorado, and in her spare time, Susan loves to research local history and genealogy.
Reach her by e-mail at:writertobias@gmail.com
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Baling hay brings back memories
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