The Memory of Hay

"Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived...Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away."

Helen Keller, quoted in Nancy Ortberg's new book, Looking for God

The barn is full of hay bales. Not the big round ones you see in the fields these days that look like a giant spilled his baklava all over the countryside. These are the compact and solid small, square bales, tightly twined toward each end and about the size of a small ottoman. They stack in tightly like bricks, filling the far end of the large metal barn on my granddad's cattle farm. As my father slides the large rolling door open, my sister and I race in, climbing quickly to be the first to reach the top. They are stacked in a staggered fashion, leaving an puzzle-like staircase for us to clamor up. Sometimes the stack reaches to the top of the barn and our dad issues a caution to "be careful" to us as we try to touch the ceiling. We carefully sit and peer down on he and his father, chatting beside the dark green tractor parked in the main area, or checking on an expectant cow that might be confined to the barn until her delivery. We feel like giants sitting on a sweet smelling dried clover sofa. When we climb down, we often take a moment to push away the loose strands of residue at the edge of the stack to see the spot in the concrete where we pushed our hands in the wet cement and wrote our names with a stick. We lay our hands over the impressions, seeing how much our hand extends beyond the print and noting how much more grown up we are now.

In the years to come, I grow old enough to drive the tractor with the brick red wagon-trailer behind it, as my dad and granddad walk along and pick up the baled hay from the field. A hired man comes in and rakes the fields, following up with a hay baler. It's a fascinating machine that draw the loose, dried grasses into it's inner workings and shoots the twined bales out a square shoot in the back. Picking up hay is back breaking work, and I wonder at my grandfather, who even then seemed too ancient to be doing such hard labor. Driving for them requires focus and attention in a boring job so as not to go too fast and to hold steady on the steep hills of the farm pasture. Once in a moment of inattentiveness, I push down on the clutch and miss the gear allowing the whole rig to roll forward too quickly and get quite a scare as I rush down the hill, loosing a few bales along the way. Neither man chides me though--they only worry that I'll be hurt and urge me to be more careful. We proceed through the morning, slow and steady, until the hay is piled higher than they can toss the bales and we head back to the barn. I slide over and let my dad drive us in at a faster pace, thankful for a respite and the slight breeze that cools my sunburned arms.

These bales will last through the winter to feed the small herd of black angus my granddad raises for food and profit. They graze on the 80 acres that contain the farmhouse, a small pond, another smaller barn, and an oil well pump and tanks that emit a pungent oily crude smell of their own. Soon we head to the house, sweat and dirt mixing with an itchiness from the hay. It's a good tired we feel, and grandmother greets us with a cold cup of water, or maybe a bottle of orange soda which we accept gratefully.

When I was only 19 years old, newly married and newly moved to Michigan, I took a job that required me to take a bus from the suburbs to downtown Detroit in the early winter for 2 weeks of training. One day the bus let us off in front of a construction area where they were pouring new sidewalks. There were bales of straw, some broken open and scattered near the site. As we hurried into the building, someone commented on the "bales of hay" and how out of place they were here in the big city. "It's straw, not hay. Trust me, I know hay from straw," I commented. After our elevator had climbed high to our class on one of the upper floors of the skyscraper, I peered down from one of the windows to the street below. I smiled and wondered how it would be to press my hand into the wet concrete below and leave my mark beside the square twined bales.