The Ditch Hay That Filled Mom’s Barn

“You’re not selling the cows,” I said.

“Then I’ll pay him.”

“You’re not paying him either.”

She laughed at that, which surprised both of us. “Well then, Shelby Ann. What do you think I’m going to feed them?”

I did not have an answer that day. I had one by Sunday.

It came to me driving home from church. Josh had the radio on the farm report, and the man was talking about drought assistance and haying the conservation ground, and Josh said, “Some of the guys at the plant are haying road ditches.”

I turned and looked at him.

“Some counties let you,” he said. “You get a permit. You ask the landowners. Lot of guys are doing it this year because there’s nothing else to cut.”

I looked out the window at the ditches going by. The fields were brown and crisp.

But down in the ditches, where every little rain ran off the road and sat a while, the brome grass and the sweet clover were green and standing up almost to my knee.

“Josh,” I said. “Pull over.”

He did, on the shoulder by the Hansen place. I got out in my church dress and walked down into the ditch and pulled a handful of grass.

It was not alfalfa. It was not Dad’s meadow hay. But it was hay.

When I got back in the truck, Josh was grinning at me. “You’re going to do it,” he said.

The county roads office is in the basement of the courthouse, next to the extension office.

A woman named Bev ran it, and she had been running it since I was in high school. She already had a stack of permit forms on the corner of her desk.

“You’re the ninth one this month,” she said, sliding one across to me. “Everybody’s haying the ditches. There are rules, honey. Read them twice.”

The rules were simple enough. No mowing before July 15, so the pheasants and the meadowlarks could get their babies off the nest. Stay off the road surface.

Keep your equipment off the shoulder when you’re not working. Ask the landowner first, because the ditch along a man’s land is his to hay before it’s yours.

I took the form home and made a list of every place along the four miles of gravel between Mom’s lane and the blacktop, and the two miles running north toward the river. Eleven landowners. Some of them I had known my whole life.

I called every one of them that week. I told them the truth, which was that I wanted to put up hay for my mother’s cows.

Not one of them asked why Brent wasn’t doing it. They knew. In a county like ours, people always know.

Every one of them said yes. Old Mr. Lindgren said yes and then said, “Tell your mother I said hello, and tell her Ray would be proud of you.” That one I had to sit in the car for a minute after.

The next thing was equipment. Dad’s tractor was still in the machine shed, an old Farmall that Brent had not touched since he moved everything over to his own outfit.

Dad’s sickle mower and his side rake were still hanging on the wall behind it.

The baler was the hard part. Dad had sold his square baler when he went to big rounds in the nineties.

Brent ran a round baler now, and I was not about to ask him for it, and I could not have handled those big bales by hand anyway.