While the Father-in-Law recovers from his heart surgery, I’ve been doing my best to help out at the farm. This week, that included making a bit of hay. I’ve done the raking before, but this week marked the first time I did it all – mowing, raking, and baling.
I shall confess to a bit of nervousness on the last item. There’s three objects to keep track of – Tractor, Baler, and Wagon. Fortunately, I seemed to have picked it up pretty quick. I was also assured the rule was that if the bale misses the wagon, you’re responsible for picking it up. I’m proud to say that out of 120* bales, not one missed the mark. That included one that ricocheted off the left post, over to the right side, and then down into the wagon. Boo ya.
I mentioned on Twitter what I spent the day doing and a friend asked ‘How was haying?”
I replied – “Haying is fun. Hard work but it catches on like a fever.”
Clearly I am a literary genius.
* My original estimate of 60+ bales was incredibly far off. Counted as we unloaded today and it came out to an even 120.
Moose and Ink 
My family still teases me about my brief career as a tractor driver. I spent a summer helping my stepfather build three miles of barbed wire fence. The old blue tractor, whose name was Lizzie, had a post hole attachment. That was a lifesaver in rocky clay soil. Anyway, I was driving her back to the house one day, and as I came up to the garage and pulled the brake – nothing happened. The bucket was up, and all I could do was watch and shriek as it crashed, in very slow motion, into the rain gutter above the garage door. I was only going two or three miles an hour, if that, and the roof was sturdy enough to arrest my forward momentum. The only damage was the broken gutter, some splintered plywood, a few bent shingles, and my badly-bruised knee.
In the aftermath, several people asked about the tractor, but only my mother asked if I was okay. I burst into tears when she did.
My father, upon hearing the story, said, “Yeah, that brake on the right always has been a little hit-and-miss. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t pull the brake on the left?”
“There’s a brake on the left?”
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Whoops 🙂 So far I haven’t demolished anything.
I think that ‘Where are the brakes?’ was one of the first questions I asked when I got on the tractor. Right after ‘Are you sure you want *me* driving this thing?’
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