Sunday, May 11, 2014

Cowgirl Sass & Savvy


Haystacks and kids

by Julie Carter

As you drive down the highways across America, most rural areas have something in common along with barns, livestock and tight fences. That would be hay stacks. Coast to coast, border to border, they rise up representative of the fruit of the land. 

I grew up with hay meadows as much part of ranch life as were the cattle, horses, chickens and pigs. With the brome and timothy grasses as tall as I was, the world beneath the tops was a maze of sweet smelling grass and places to hide.  Wearing out the knees on my jeans, I spent hours crawling through the grass hiding from my brothers who thought the game was delightful fun.

One of those firsts in life happened when my grandfather let me drive the tractor pulling the baler. I felt so grown up. Baling hay when I could barely reach the pedals on the tractor! But the best part was to come when those bales were placed in long and high stacks in the hay lot.

To my dad those hay stacks represented a long winter of feeding cattle in snow filled pastures on cold windy days. To his children, they were a play land that allowed imaginations to create worlds they had never experienced. 

Those haystacks became submarines, airplanes, sailing ships, skyscrapers, wagon trains and every now then, just haystacks.

My brothers and I would create a story to go with the item we’d made of the stack for that day. We flew to parts of the world we couldn’t even spell. We had offices in a high rise building even if it was primitive, with a rope that served as an elevator.

We sailed seas and fought pirates. We went west with Major Adams and Flint McCullough and circled the wagons when under Indian attack. The dare devil in the boys would come out when the ropes were strung across the lot to other stacks. Making that trip stack to stack by hanging on the rope was the same as making the crossing rim to rim of the Grand Canyon.

And then there was that one game that we older two are most proud of — pulling out a few bales to make a “pit” and leaving our younger brother there so we could run off to the creek to go fishing without the little pest tagging along.

We had no idea at that time what the world of our future would hold for us. When we got home from school we would run down the hill, climb over the pole fence to that baled wonderland and leave any thoughts of the future behind. Life was so simple and so innocent. Well except the part about hiding from our brother.

Today, the four of us that lived that simple childhood life smelling of fresh cut hay just in from the field, have scattered to a world of careers, corporations, traffic and neighbors next door. Yet for us all, the smell of an alfalfa field in bloom or the sight a haystack standing tall brings instant recall of those distant times.

I don’t know what part of my character was formed on those haystacks but I’ll always believe it played a big part of who I am today. And that pest of a brother? He still is.


Julie can be reached for comment at jcarternm@gmail.com

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