Attribution: Dorothea Lange, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, gives the floor to the keeper for yet another tidbit of rural info for his city friends: the reason the old barns were so big is that they were built back before hay balers and choppers when big haymows were required to store enough “loose” hay to feed the herd through the winter.
That “loose” hay filled the haymow with a glacial entanglement that was the nemesis of a skinny farm kid armed with a pitchfork. Not only was it cold and dark up in the haymow there was the possibility of foreign entities lurking in the shadows and pulling the hay apart so it could be thrown down the hay chute was like trying to disassemble a baked cake.
Before mechanism came to farming, the daily work of tending to the orifices of cows was daunting–up in the haymow, in the frozen silo, the outside straw stack to get fresh bedding and then the daily bobsled run with a load of manure to hand spread on the snow-covered field, trying to remember to never throw a forkful of manure into the wind.
The keeper has obviously told Phyllis about all of this before but he plans to tell her again and then promise to never try to coax her up into the haymow, at least in the winter.
