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.