Sanguine Tenacious Tidings

Sounds and Scents

Take us on a sensory journey to a place that is significant to you. Try to describe the place using all of your senses so we can be there with you!

Quote: “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture


Book To Read From the App Audio Books from Libervox: The Adventures of a Grain of Dust by Hallan Hawksworth

Sounds and Scents of Haying Time

Morning on haying day has its own way of meeting the sun. The first thought I have is look at the sky. Is the sun coming up on clear blue sky, are the clouds high or low, white or gray, stratus or cumulus? Today we have high light covering of cirrus. Hopefully they with burn off as the morning progresses. The object for the day is dry grass turning into hay. Bales that are stored in a barn must absolutely be dry inside and out. One bale with wet grass bundled into the center can cause enough heat to combust into flame and burn everything around it in raging fire.

The scene out the window by my desk is green. Lawn grass and brown trees sit still with only the smallest breath of a breeze. Beyond the yard sits the red combination of pieces of metal, chains, and immense flywheel sitting in a part of the field, where it was abandoned after the last use. Waiting as only a monstrous machine can appear to wait to resume the task of turning rows of dry grass into manageable precisely formed bales of hay. Bales that can be stacked in high blocks to await the day when winter winds are futility beating on the barn walls and doors. That will be the day when the effort of storing a thousand 100 pound blocks of hay will be worthwhile as the animals lounge around in clean stalls eating their fill maintaining for spring.

Behind the baler a flat floored wagon with a rack built on the back. also sits in the field waiting for the days labor to begin.

Fifty yards beyond as the sun is now rising is the hay laid down the day before with still a different type of machine. A machine built to cut the bottom of a 4 foot high stalk of grass a few inches from the ground and press some of the moisture from the grass as it lays it onto the ground in long rows ten feet wide, that are satiny and crinkly to touch. The sound is like a whispered sheeee as you push your arm through them to feel the weight and dryness.

The mown grass will lay in the sun and air drying until it is a texture that will properly run its way through the baler. But before that, some one will climb onto a tractor hook up still a different machine. This time it will be a rather ancient rust brown rake. The rake is built to turn the hay a few hours before it is baled so the under side that is laying on the ground will dry in the white blue summer sunshine. On like people farm machine rarely retires it is used and repaired. Parts are changed and so the metal on the rake has becomes an aged brown color, used to setting outside in the weather, then as the season returns for hay, it is put into service as it is needed.

The ancient rake will roll the hay into long rows about three feet wide. Like a cake roll without any filling the rows will be ready for the baler.

It will be a long cavalcade of machinery. The tractor first pulling the baler, the baler has a 30 foot long wagon hooked behind it. The driver has to be skilled in order to maneuver the bed of the baler into the proper position so it will pick up the row as they trundle along. There is a sound that goes with this scene. Its goes something like this, chunk, chunk,chunk, k-clip,the sound beats over and over. It"s the mechanics of the machine pushing the hay through the square box; squashing it together as if packing too many clothes into a suit case for a long journey.

The driver feels like a mother sitting in a rocking chair. As the baler rocks back and forth doing its work, it is also gently rocking the tractor back and forth, while you progress at a snails pace across the field. The twenty foot high trailer loads are pulled into the barn and unloaded by hand.

At the end the family that accomplishes this is tired, but understands the worth of what they are doing. It's a good tiredness only honest work can achieve. Bigger farms, more expensive equipment can be bought for thousands of dollars that takes some of the work out of the day. No matter the amount of money spent or work accomplished make no mistake it is necessary to life.

The End