The Haystack

When I was a boy I loved the haystack.  It was tall and massive to me.  It was great fun to climb.  It was a place of imagination.  My mind could turn it into so many things.  My friends and I would play on it for hours.  Yes, I had friends.  But my purposes for the haystack were not why Grandpa stacked it.  It took three crops of hay gathered through an entire summer to store enough to feed the animals through the winter.  When I was a boy it was all stacked by hand.  Grandpa didn’t have any  mechanical elevators to take the bales to the top or machines to pick the bales up in the field and then stack them without getting off the machine.  It was stacked by a person throwing the bales up a few levels to another person who would repeat the process until they had made the stack tall enough.  It had to be stacked correctly by laying the bales at right angles to each other to tie it together so it wouldn’t fall apart.  It was hard work.  I realized early in my life that work was necessary for everything we had or enjoyed.  If production is the objective, work, in any of its varied forms, is required.  I also came to understand that work well done produces a sense of satisfaction that I couldn’t get any other way.  Even on the most menial and mindless tasks I’ve done throughout my life, at the end of the day I always felt better if I had done my best than if I had just tried to get by.  Someone else might not know I hadn’t given my best, but I would.  Work is great medicine.  Farming is many things.  For Grandpa it was long, hard work.  It was disappointment and sometimes failure even when he did everything right.  There are no guarantees in farming.  It was getting up early and going to bed late and sometimes not going to bed at all.  It was sweat and grease and blood.  It was the disaster of a late frost or the heartbreak of an early one.  It was losing a prized animal.  It was loneliness.  It was boredom while plowing or planting or fertilizing or harvesting seemingly endless acres of crops.  It was sacrifice.  It was getting up in the morning when you just didn’t feel like it and couldn’t call in sick.  It was milking cows twice a day every day for as long as necessary.  It was being patient but also at times having to respond with urgency.  It was inconvenient.  It was living under the daily pressure of eking out a living with meager resources.  It was working when you were sick you could barely stand or so tired you could hardly stay awake.  It was doing without.  It was just hard.  But at the end of the day when the cows were milked, the animals fed, and the machinery put away, Grandpa felt a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.  There was satisfaction each time the hay was baled and stacked, each time the barley was harvested and stored safely in the granary.  There was satisfaction with each ear of sweet corn he picked and the potatoes when they were safely stored in the cellar for the winter.  Every squash he carried to the basement for winter storage compensated him for all the time he’d spent growing it.  Despite all of the hardships, breakdowns, disappointments, or failures, the fruit of the harvest was always sweet.  Not only did the harvest produce what was needed to live each day, but also many of the fulfilling feelings that made all the work, inconvenience, and sacrifice worthwhile.  After a crop of hay was baled, hauled, and stacked, it was satisfying to step back and look at the stack.  That always felt good no matter what my stack represented even when I wasn’t a farmer.  I have never tired of that feeling, the feeling of accomplishment at a job done, and done well.