Hay!

I have a somewhat secret affection for haystacks.  If you drive around Iowa long enough at certian times of the year, you'll see them.  They're those lonely beacons in the middle of fields boldly barring the way of the clear view or the straight-arrow shortcut.  I enjoy them for the visual blips they create across an otherwise "smooth" landscape.  I enjoy them because they are always there, day after day, until some farmer comes along to claim one for duty.  When duty calls, along comes a tractor with a fork lift or a special truck outfitted to pick up hay.  The tractor loads up the required bales and off they go, returning us to our unblemished landscape.  Probably most exciting to me is the 2 or 3 times a year when the hay is harvested.  You can sort of feel the hay harvest in the air.  It's not like "the big" harvest when the corn and soybeans come in, but it seems like there's a certain excitement about it.  Or, maybe it's more like a certain smug satisfaction with having a job to complete in the middle of the long growing season.  First, the hay-cutters show up.  They leave swaths of cut grass in long tails that seem to form a labyrinth across the fields.  Some farmers leave that freshly-cut grass a few days to dry out a bit until along come the balers.  As far as I can tell, balers seem to be the jalopies of farming.  They come in all shapes, sizes, and, conditions.  There are the big round balers, small round balers and the square balers.  One time this past fall, it was my best day ever when two farmers near me baled hay in the same day...on one side of the road, there were large round bales while on the other there were squares!  Too cool!  Now, as the ground freezes and the fields turn to their winter gray, the bales that remain out there seem at once stubborn (for still standing) and lonely as they bundle themselves up against the cold.  When I'm with the kids in the car and we come across one of those fields, I ponder a second and then, I just can't help it, I yell, "Hey!"  Makes 'em look everytime!