I own a haystack. I have to admit that I find this remarkable. Then again, I suppose it isn’t any more remarkable than the fact that I also on a little red barn and five horses, and a tiny piece of ground to keep them on. And then, there’s the old draft horse of a Suburban and the horse trailer. Now I’m thinking about it, I also have a refrigerator, which is a fairly odd thing for a person to own. And a number of toilets.
When we were first married—well, I’m talking ten or twelve years into it—my husband told me that every time he opened a cupboard to find some medicine or spices or whatever, he was always surprised that the stuff inside it was ours. Like, he expected it to be his mother’s. My first answer would have been (back then) that if he were the one who had scootched his little old self and several small children on over to the grocery store to procure all that stuff, he might not see the thing so much as a magic cabinet. But there you are: it is odd to find yourself all grown up and owning nesting tables and heating pads.
But this story is about the haystack. Building it is one of the huge events of the year. Somebody has to grow the stuff, praying for no rain after the cutting, and then be willing to sell it to me. And deliver it. Then I have to find several strong backs to stack the stuff in that nice little place in my barn. And after that, I hover over it for months, panic stricken that there won’t be enough. With that in mind, I stack it high and tight. Which is only good husbandry. But in the end, I also have to get it unstacked so I can feed it to my steeds.
Every morning, as early as I can stand it – which is not terribly early in the winter, as I can abide neither cold nor darkness – I get on out there to the barn to feed my guys. Horses stand around all night long with their feet in snow and their butt-ends to the freezing wind in—lately—seven degree and below weather. How they do this without freezing, I’m sure I don’t know. How wasps do it, I really don’t know – but they thaw out, the nasty things, in the spring, and may even freeze and thaw again before they have a chance to sting anybody.
The way you warm up a horse in NOT to put a blanket-jacket on him. Blankets just keep them from growing their plush winter coats – and I do mean plush, especially if there’s any pony blood in the animal. No, the way you warm them up is to feed them. The act of eating hay heats a horse up so well and so fast, you can see steam rising from their backs as they eat on a cold winter day. So I try to be there early after a bad night, just to stoke the furnaces.
I come back in the evening, just before dark, and do the same thing, feeding a measure of hay and another of grain. And thus we come back to the haystack. My stack is about fourteen feet high. And each bale weighs about eighty pounds. The roof slopes, so those top bales are just sort of wedged in up there at the top, and the only way to get up to them is to let the horses eat my way to it, pulling the lowest and farthest out bales first, and making a sort of giant staircase to the top.
Sometimes when I’m out there, I’m gone a little extra long – mucking out the stalls, or cleaning hooves or what have you. And once in a while, somebody from home will call just to check and make sure I have not been kicked in the head or crushed against the wall or run over. Last week, Guy called to check up, and I was, as I almost always am, just fine. In fact, I was nearly on my way home. All I had left to do was climb up on the top of the stack and pull down the morning’s bale of hay.
So I hung up, and I climbed. And what follows is a picture essay of what happens when everybody at home thinks you are all safe and hunky-dory and you get a little full of yourself and careless:
I had climbed up there with my two red hooks in my hand – sliding eighty pounds of porcupine-textured hay across several others of the same is not an easy job,
and the hooks help when you can’t get up above the darn things. The only problem is, sometimes you think your hooks are buried deep into the hay—when they’re not.
So what you see here is a reenactment of the actual bone-headed stupidity:
So, as they say, let that be a lesson to you. Hey—don’t play around with hooks, or you just might fall. Or something like that.
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