The hot weather of June....

June, hot weather, and the living is easy. Or so some people would say. Not where I grew up! On a farm in central Wisconsin, there was nothing easy about June and hot weather. That's because it was haying time. According to my dad, we had to fill that big barn with hay for the winter, not a concept I really understood at all at age eight.

Eight is the age I learned to drive a team of horses on a hay wagon. And on the hay fork. The hay fork was a huge iron spider like thing that picked up loads of had, then was pulled by a series of ropes and pulleys up to the peak of a barn. Then it clicked into place and rode a rail into the hay lofts. When it was where dad wanted it, he pulled a little rope, tripping the fork and dropping the load of hay.

Something had to pull that huge load hay up to the very top of the barn. And that something was me and a team of horses so big that from behind, where I was stuck, I could not see their heads. Dad said it was easy. Hold two leather reins, and steer the horses in a straight line. Oh sure, I understood that perfectly. The horses were hooked to a wooden gizmo, that thankfully, I forgotten the name of, then the rope was on a huge iron hook, that hooked into the wooden gizmo.

When the horses pulled, the whole thing tightened, and rose up in the air a good four feet off the ground. Way taller than I was. My dad would be yelling at me to get away from that thing. "If the rope breaks, it could kill you!" So why was it, you have an eight year old kid driving these monstrous beasts with a rope that is pulled so tight it is four feet in the air?

God, I hated that job! I loved riding horses, but I never developed a love of the huge horses my dad kept on the farm. When other farmers had bought tractors, he was still using horses for some things. And haying was one of them.

Once we moved to a much bigger farm, dad bought a big tractor and a baler, and there was no more hay fork. My sisters and brothers never had to live in terror that they would be killed by a flying rope or runaway beasts of horses. Baling isn't any better. It's hot, sweaty and just plain miserable! I hated that too.

There's a reason I live in a city. And it has to do with spending my entire childhood and teenage years working on the farm. There was nothing else. To live on my dad's farm was to work on the farm. No excuses, no escape. School because the law required that. Other than that, it was work.

There are good memories too, not near as many as I wish there were. This hot weather we're having right now, unfortunately brings back the not so good ones.