~:: The Wood Knocks Back ::~

Note on the last three days: earlier this year I updated WordPress, my blog software.  I’d never had a problem doing this before – but this time, I lost my visual editor and nothing I could do, nothing on the support forums helped.  Three days of trying later, I regressed to my old software, and everything finally worked again.

Long story short – I finally was able to update some of my other blogs.  But I didn’t dare try it on this, my core site.  Finally, yesterday morning, I decided to make the leap.  And sure enough, lost my editor.  In trying to fix this, we ended up dumping the entire site, losing our connection to the database that includes all my options and settings.  Luckily, I had backups.  But I lost everything from yesterday.  And I’m still working on my menus.  I think we’re functional now.  But I apologize for the mess.  And I’m going to try to put together the next Santa Fe sequence – which I labored over and lost.  Just another interesting event to finish out the month.

You remember last post when I said I’d put up more shots of Arches?  I meant it.  I really did.  But you remember the post before that?  How I was hoping the last wave had hit?  I mean, yeah – it never actually does, that last wave, until mortality is over; and by then it’s too late to balance your check book.

Anyway, I thought you might like to know about Monday.  Monday was supposed to be the first day of the rest of my life.  And it started out so very well.  My throat had pretty much gotten itself straightened out, and M and I were finally settling down to the bits of mind-boggling web coding I’d been trying to get through for months (complicated stuff that won’t change what you’re looking at one tiny bit – hopefully). And the new dishwasher (that would be new #2) that had been scheduled to be delivered Tuesday had been bumped up to that very Monday evening.  And Chelsea’s parents, visiting from Ohio, were dropping by to make sure she had not moved into a den of crazy people or cultists or white slavers.  So I planned to clean up the house.  Or at least find the shovel so I COULD.

M and I made this quiet little side-by-side workstation on the dining room table, fired up the software, sat down, turned to speak to each other – when the phone rang.

It was my beloved farmer and neighbor, John, and he said, “Hay’s in.  You want it tonight or tomorrow night?”  That sentence probably doesn’t strike terror into your heart as you read it, does it?  But this is what it meant to me:

210 bales of hay – hefted by large people with arms strong enough to pick up a 40” x 20” eighty pound bale of hay by two stings and toss it eight feet in the air so that it can be stacked – all 210 bales – into a twelve by twelve by twelve stall – within a window of time defined by how long horses can be left on lush grass before they explode.

Further meaning:

1. I ran all around the neighborhood in the morning, pounding on doors, trying to enlist every good natured, strong backed neighbor I could dig out of hiding and commit them at the last minute to an hour and a half’s hard labor in the sweltering heat of a July afternoon in a metal barn.  (“Please sign me up,” they plead.)

2. Since everybody was at work or on vacation, I  spent the rest of the morning spinning out emails and phone calls like a last Vegas card dealer.  Not calling in favors, but racking them up – tall as we hoped the stacks of hay will be.  This would be the first time John-the-hay-maven had given me a choice of days – the possibility of 30 hours’ notice.  But he also mentioned that it was supposed to RAIN that afternoon – and wet hay does not stack well.  It ripens pretty quickly into this pile of blue mold –

3.  So I got my crew committed (Heaven bless them all for the honest-to-earth angels that they are – Rachel’s kids and husband, and the Amazing Seth, And the Dallys and Cam’s L’s brother, John.  And other neighbors and young men I hardly knew, some I know well and want to kiss every day, plus two girls from BYU who are friends of Murph and L.  And my sons.  My great, stalwart, dependable, hard working, faithful sons.

4.  M and I got everything ready.  Moved stuff around in the barn.  Cleaned up the place. I was going to lay out all the huge tarps, but I decided to wait and do that just before the hay came.

5. When we finally made a Walmart run for surgical masks, (you don’t want to breathe in hay dust if you can help it.  First time I did it, I got literal hay fever – and it was ugly – so I get them for everybody) it began to rain.  We were hoping it would be little sprinkle, and localized. By the time we got back to the barn—half an hour before delivery—we sat in the car on the driveway, scared to get out.  The rain was coming down in buckets and there was lightening striking all over the place.

6. But come, the hay did anyway.  The rain had quit, but the top layers of the hay load were soaked down at least a quarter to half an inch.  And the tarps I hadn’t yet put out were outside, drenched.  And there was standing water in the arena.

Thankfully, the crew showed up.  Came, set their caps and rolled up their sleeves and started hauling.  Wet bales to the side.  Dry bales on the stacks.  I did what I could – which wasn’t that much.  Mostly cheerleading.  In spite of the wet ground  the work went forward with grit and ingenuity.  Those brave people all ended up lifting an average of about a thousand pounds per person.  Lifted by love.  And with such good grace.  Two exchange students from China – “We’re from the city,” they said.  “Never get opportunity like this.  It was fun.”

By the time we were finished,  you could have wrung their shirts out and gotten a gallon off each.

I guess I see a lot of morals to this story:

1. Never assume that the day you greet at first light is the day you’ll look back on at sunset.

2.  When people talk about real life, unless they mean neighbors and friends showing up year after year—for no reward except having helped a friend—and working like Morgan horses, and bringing in a harvest that means life for another winter, they’re falling short of the concept.

There’s still a lot of work to do, taking down the temporary open architecture stacks of damp bales and integrating them into the main stacks –but when I look at that hay, I look at so many miracles – that a spray of tiny seeds can turn dirt into food for a winter and a neighborhood into a community.  I stand all amazed.  This is what the spirit of America means to me – or more broadly – the true human spirit – putting on the harness together, pulling together, lightening a work with laughter and love – taking care of each other.  LONG may that wave.

And that’s why I haven’t put up any more shots yet.  By the way – it looks like THIS dishwasher is actually going to work.

And whatever you do – do NOT update your WordPress.  Well, you kind of have to sometimes.  But if you DO, keep your fingers crossed the ENTIRE time.