“We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.”
Louise Elizabeth Gluck
Farm life has always followed the cycle of the seasons. For instance, as I was growing up, June and later in July if there was a second crop was haymaking time. Then, as the intense heat of late July and August set in, it was time for wheat and oats threshing. With the advent of autumn, it became corn-husking time. When winter arrived, other activities were addressed like mending fences that there had not been time or energy for during the growing season.
During threshing time, we did it all in what would now be considered the old-fashioned way. From an early age, I was tasked driving the two huge draft horses Bonnie and Sorrelly slowly around the sun-ripened fields while my dad and grandpa and other older men tossed the sheaves up onto the wagon.
It was fun time for Grandpa’s terrier dog Bobby as he followed the plodding horses because huge blacksnakes would be coiled beneath the sheltering shocks. One bone cracking snap by the feisty little dog ended their slithering careers.
Today, when tourists see wheat shocks dotting the fields of an Amish farm, they see only beauty. In reality, shocking wheat is one of the most exhausting activities required of the farmers of yesteryear. In fact, the entire business of harvesting grain was hot, sweaty, gritty and energy draining.
For me, it was a rite of passage. Too small for the truly heavy work of the older men, I was given a number of other tasks. When wagon loads of wheat or oats sheaves were pulled into the barn, the men on top would use pitchforks to toss them into the awaiting jaws of the threshing machine. Most farmers in those days did not possess the air-conditioned combines so common today.
Long before the morning was over, all of us were sweat soaked, grimy, layered with dust, attacked by stinging sweat bees and the even more painful deer flies with their pointed probosces, our skins dalmatiated with tiny pestilential oats bugs.
When huge horse flies attached themselves to the sweaty hides of Bonnie and Sorrelly, extracting their quota of blood, I learned early on how to snap the reins and smash them into green mush. The horses suffered no harm from my ministrations, relieved to be rid of their biting tormentors. My dad, growing up on the farm in an earlier era, short on opportunities for entertainment, shared with me that he used to tie strings on horse flies and fly them like tiny model airplanes.
Over the years, I could measure my progress toward adulthood by my increasing ability to lift the heavy burlap sacks of grain and tie them shut as the golden tide of wheat or oats tumbled down the chute. It was a grownup’s job, and I was conscious of my growing up.
As wheat and oat straw were blown into the loft, our sweat-soaked bodies were soon covered with chaff. It was far worse earlier in the summer during haymaking. This was a time before many farmers had the machinery to bale hay and straw. Instead, the horses would be led out across the field, pulling ropes that ran through pulleys carrying a large fork filled with hay up into the loft. When the fork was sprung open, the hay tumbled down over our usually shirtless bodies, causing us to look like tar and feather victims.
If it was hot outside in the summer sun, it was far worse in the loft, beneath a metal roof, with no ventilation. On some dire occasions, one would become so hot as to begin feeling chilled, the body’s first warning of advancing heat exhaustion. It was wise to sit down before falling down, as little bright spots began to dance and coalesce across one’s field of vision.
Farmers of that era, like my grandpa, were generally attired in similar “uniforms”; long-sleeved gray cotton flannel work shirts, faded jeans, suspenders, heavy work shoes, a wide brimmed straw hat, exchanged in cold weather for either a faded old corduroy hunting cap or one of those stereotypical dairyman’s caps. It varied little. They were pragmatic in the extreme, work was work and work clothes were work clothes.
In my case, I went stubbornly shirtless all summer long, from the final day of school until the purgatorial classrooms swallowed us up again after Labor Day. That is, other than when I was forced to attend the weekly ennui of the Sabbath when I would watch the hands of the clock behind the minister’s head creep agonizingly slowly across its face until, along with my fellow hooligans, we were released to ply the local streams and farm ponds in search of bluegills, smallmouth bass and catfish until nightfall. Haying and threshing did not take place on Sundays.
Despite my youth, I was proud to be a man among men, carefully scrubbing off the dirt and dust at the kitchen sink before trooping in at dinnertime, which we would call lunchtime today.
That was the only real break, sometime around noon. It was often said in those days when confronted by an outsized sumptuous dinner that it consisted of enough to feed threshers. Indeed, the heavy oak dinner table would appear to be groaning under the weight of all the food. It took a lot to adequately feed threshers. A great-aunt named Corey came to assist Grandma with the cooking, a day-long task, that, like those of the farmer, began before sunrise.
One plate would be piled high with rafts of Grandpa’s home-smoked ham, another with stacks of French bread. The menu included chicken gravy and biscuits, both a green and a yellow vegetable to guarantee a balanced vitamin regimen, a round glass butter dish filled to the brim with soft butter, another dish of apple butter and yet another of homemade grape jelly, roast chicken, mashed potatoes, creamed cabbage, creamed peas, creamed corn, corn on the cob if available. For dessert, apple pie, and grape pie, sometimes mincemeat pie, rounded out the meal. Our calorie consumption must have been astronomical, but we truly did work it off out in the sunbaked fields and the brick oven heat of the barn all afternoon.
The day’s work ended with the setting sun. Sort of. A farmer’s work was never done in those far-off days. There remained the horses to feed and water, cows to be milked, eggs to be gathered, the hand-operated separator to be cranked away separating milk from cream, as well as cattle, hogs, barn cats and dogs to be fed and tended to.
In his classic The Outermost House, Henry Beston shares with us, “The world today is sick to its thin blood for elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling up from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.”
I cherish the memories of those days of hard work beneath the summer sun, the quiet talk of men working at simple tasks, the reality of filling a barn to provide sustenance for farm animals for the winter, of caring for livestock, of crashing into bed almost too tired to sleep and yet confident that the rising sun would dawn upon yet another day of growing upward as time dragged me relentlessly onward far away from the farm and the simple life I lived there.
To this day, the fragrance of freshly mowed alfalfa, harness leather and good honest horse sweat fills me with nostalgia, transporting me back to be a more bucolic, elemental period of my life.
My enthusiasms include fly fishing, natural history and wilderness backpacking. In 1996, I published privately a memoir, Trails of Laughter/ Trails of Tears, featuring my wilderness adventures and misadventures.I serve when needed as a Licensed Eucharistic Minister in the Episcopal Church.
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The “Good Old Days” ?