Under the Maple Tree

 

Last Sunday, I spent most of the afternoon lying in a lounge chair under my maple tree.  Early afternoons on the porch are hot this time of year even with a breeze, directly in the sun.  But it was pleasant under the big tree with a nice, lazy breeze and sunlight trickling through the leaves. 

I told myself I was reading, although my book spent more time turned down in my lap than in front of my eyes. Even though the temperature still shouts summer, the change in the light whispers fall.  It has been another hot, arid summer and most of the flowers have thrown in the towel.  The four-o-clocks are wilted, and I noticed after church that even the artificial flowers at the cemetery look bedraggled.

As I lay in my chair, I heard wild geese.  They flew right over my tree, so low I thought they were going to hit the highest branches.  There were at least 15 or 20, and I am sure they were on their way to the big pond on the next farm.  There is just something about wild geese that touches my heart every time.  Can anyone hear wild geese fly over without looking up to see?  The katydids and crickets still sing, but their normally cheerful voices are muted, as if they know summer is beginning its slow glide toward fall.

The dogs are scattered around my chair, lazy in the heat of the day.  Every now and then, one will rouse and come to visit, wanting reassurance that I still love them.  Scout, who still thinks he is a lap dog, tries to get on the chair with me and I have to explain that the weight limit on this seat does not include a one-hundred-pound collie.  His look makes it clear that he does not approve of such flimsy chairs.

The old tree would have stories to tell, if it could talk, about decades of seasons in this spot.  It is the only big maple left now from the four that shaded my childhood.  They were planted by my great-great grandfather when he built this house.  His son, my great grandfather named the farm for those trees – Maple Shade Farm.  A storm took the others two decades ago, and the remaining tree has lost a few big limbs.  It used to be a chore to rake all the leaves in the front yard.  Now there aren’t even enough to bother with. I would gladly tackle the job if I could have even one or two of the old trees again.

 A battered picnic table sits under the tree, where bushels of corn have been shucked, countless watermelons have been cut, homemade ice cream has been churned, birthdays have been celebrated, and children and puppies have played in its fallen leaves.  If I listen with my eyes closed, I think I can hear the echoes of laughter and the scramble of puppy feet. 

A swing used to sit there, until another storm destroyed the frame.  It was a Christmas present for my parents, from forty years ago.  My husband and I carried it on foot, laughing every step, from our nearby house to theirs on a cold Christmas Eve.  I don’t know how we got it there without dropping it and if my parents’ bedroom had not been on the back side of the house, they would surely have heard us.  It was big enough to hold 4 or 5 children plus my mom, who was practically child sized herself.  I don’t remember a big swing in the yard when I was growing up, but I do remember a tire swing Daddy put up for me, a glider and some old metal lawn chairs.  I would love to have those chairs now, and I am mystified as to where they went and why on earth we thought we should dispose of them.  Those old metal chairs probably didn’t have a weight limit on them – Scout would have approved.

 

The Sock Hop

 

We had a sock hop at my house last night.  “We” is probably not the correct word, because I was not invited to the event.  The dogs had a sock hop, or a canine version of a sock hop. Scout, Sophie and Carli were the participants, and I’m pretty sure the whole thing was Carli’s idea and that she furnished the socks.  I woke up in the night a couple of times and heard the rustling of the plastic bag as Carli was stealing the socks.  The second time, I’m pretty sure, was when she took the whole bag.  I didn’t get up then, but when I finally did, socks were strewn from one end of the bedroom to the other end of the living room, with a shredded bag in the middle of the floor. 

The socks came from a bag I had filled with odd socks, socks with holes in them and stretched out socks that crawl down into the toes of my shoes when I wear them.  I had left them on the chest at the foot of my bed.  Ordinarily the bag would have been covered with other clothing I had thrown there but I had straightened up before I went to bed last night and the bag was there, a temptation that could not be resisted.  Plastic bags, bubble wrap and plastic bottles are also irresistible to my merry band of collies.  Sophie is also a connoisseur of cardboard boxes and sticks.  The only reason I don’t have large sticks in my house is that she hasn’t figured out how to fit them through the dog door.

Finding articles of clothing strewn around the house, the yard and the yard next door is not unusual.  The dogs’ fascination with clothing is a sure incentive to keep my clothes picked up and out of reach.  Out of reach covers very little territory, since all three dogs are almost as tall as I am when they stand on their hind paws.  And drawers must be tightly shut to keep collie noses out. My neighbor next door brought one of my shirts home last week and asked if I had missed it.  I hadn’t.  This morning, I found one of her shirts just outside the front yard.  She is the owner of one of Carli’s puppies and I suspect he has inherited more than just his coloring from his mom.

A couple of years ago, I put in a new storm door with a dog door built in.  My friends raised their eyebrows when I announced my intention.  “There is no telling what will come  in that door,” they warned.  Nothing has come in that I’m aware of, but a lot of things have gone out, thanks to the dogs.  Carli is especially prone to stealing shoes and clothes and taking them out into the yard, or further.  You do not dare leave a shoe of any kind where she can reach it.  She doesn’t tear them up; she just takes them outside and loses them.  I had a crate filled with dog toys in the living room.  The crate has been totally empty for several weeks now – all toys have been scattered all over the farm.  As I write this, there is one lone pull toy on the rug, and it does not even belong to my dogs.  It belongs to Ghost, who lives next door.  Mr. Squirrel, Mr. Horse, Mr. Giraffe, various squeaky toys, at least two kongs, and assorted old shoes have disappeared.  They would just as soon have socks and bottles and boxes anyway!

It's too hot to play outside much these days.  The dogs spend most of the daylight hours in the house asleep.  Scout has claimed one of the air conditioner vents as his very own and I finally had to move the side table that sits by it over.  His other favorite activity right now is playing beauty shop with my young cousins. 

They like to brush him and he is ecstatic to be brushed.  Natalie tells him to sit and he sits.  Eventually, he is so happy that he collapses on his side so she can reach him better.  When she stops, he reaches a paw up to pat her on the arm.  The other dogs crowd around Natalie's sister Olivia for their turn.  It's a dog's best life, here on the farm!

 

The Hay Loft

 

I drove toward town at mid-morning, with my windows down and music playing.  The rain of the last several days had ended for now and the blue sky had been washed clean.  Even before I saw it, I smelled it – a field of newly mowed hay.  As I rounded the curve, there it lay, rows and rows of cut green grass, drying in the sun.  There is nothing like the smell of fresh cut hay, unless it the smell of fresh baled hay stacked to the rafters in the barn.  It’s right up there with the smell of ripe strawberries kissed by the sun, the first whiff of approaching rain on a hot day, or lilac blossoms through the window screen. 

When I was growing up, we had two fields right beside the house that were cut for hay.  In those days, there was no such thing as the huge round bales we see so much of today.  The hay was baled into squares, bound with baling twine and picked up from the field and stacked on wagons.  The first time I ever drove a tractor was pulling a hay wagon in that front field.  It didn’t take much skill, just a steady slow path behind the baler allowing one man on the ground to throw the bales up to a second man on the wagon who stacked them. There is an art to stacking hay that only some people still understand. Each layer is placed perpendicular to the layer below. And when placed in the barn, most people like to put the bottom layer down with the sides facing up.  I still love to run a mower in a field of grass, when I can get my tractor to run.  It’s a pretty mindless task, and a person can get a lot of thinking done while getting results you can see.  I still love seeing a barn full of hay, too, although I don’t feed many square bales now. 

One of my favorite playgrounds growing up was what we called the hay barn.  Set on a little hill in the pasture back of the house, it was a simple wooden structure with a loft divided by an open space with a manger all the way down the length of the barn.  The cattle could come inside the barn on both sides to eat from the manger and it was easy to throw enough bales down from above to last a few days.  The lofts were tall and airy, with an opening at the front of the barn where the hay was delivered.  We had a hay elevator by the time I was a child, run off a power takeoff from the tractor.  It was like a tall, slanted conveyor belt that took the bales up into the loft where someone waited to stack them.

Those glorious fragrant bales of hay made wonderful building blocks for castles, forts, houses and hiding places.    My friends and I would move them around and invent games.  I made up elaborate stories about kings, queens, cowboys, or detectives.   Most of the time we would ride the horse out there, tying him  up in a corner of barn where he was content to munch on the hay for the afternoon.  The dogs would always follow us to the barn, but they could not climb the ladder so they would chase rabbits until we were ready to go home.  Rainy days were especially fun in the hayloft, and if we got too hot or too dirty, we could take a shower on the way back to the house.

 Sometimes we would jump from the loft into the center of the manger, into a deep cushion of hay.   I think we tried a time or two to jump into the saddle from the loft, but that did not prove to be successful.  The horses didn’t think too much of the game and we quickly gave it up as a bad idea.  It looked a lot easier on the TV westerns.

Years later, when my mom became a childcare provider for a procession of young people who became like family, it was to be expected that they discovered the barn loft as a playground.  We had stopped using the loft as storage for square bales of hay, but there was plenty of old straw and hay up there to provide props for games of hide and seek and forts for pretend warfare.  There was almost a century’s worth of dust and dirt and it was easy to tell when they had been playing there.  One New Year’s Day, while my friends and I gathered at my house for brunch and football, all the kids disappeared for most of the afternoon.  When they reappeared, a few hours later, they were covered in dust and dirt. 

“What on earth have you been doing?” their parents asked.  I didn’t have to ask.  I knew they had been playing in the loft.  I was glad to see that they were still young enough to do that.  Some pastimes never change, and I suspect that as long as there are barn lofts with bales of hay, children will be playing there.  And the smell of new cut hay will transport people like me back to a carefree time when imaginations could transform a barn full of hay into anything.