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.
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