The Ditch Hay That Filled Mom’s Barn

Don Meyer lives two miles south of Mom. He is 77 and still keeps a few horses, and he still puts up small squares for them because, as he says, a horse person likes a bale she can pick up.

I drove over on a Thursday evening and found him in his shop. I told him what I wanted to do.

He listened with his arms folded, nodding, and then he walked me out behind the shop to a lean-to.

There it sat. An old red square baler, faded to the color of a barn that needs painting, with a little tongue and a knotter that he told me he had rebuilt twice.

“Still ties,” Don said, patting the side of it. “Mostly. You’ll want to carry extra twine and a pair of pliers, and you’ll want to call me the first time it misses, because it will.”

“What do I owe you?”

He looked at me like I had said something rude. “You owe me a pie, and you owe your mother the hay. Bring it back when the frost comes.”

On July 15, I got off at the vet clinic at four.

I had the tractor and the mower at the end of Mom’s lane by a quarter to five, and I started cutting the ditch along her own fence line, going north.

I mowed for three hours that first evening. Mowing is the easy part. Then you wait for it to dry, which in a drought takes about a day and a half.

Then you rake it into a windrow. Then you bale it. Then you pick up every bale by hand.

Two evenings later, I hitched Don’s baler to Dad’s tractor and started down the first windrow.

The baler thumped and chunked the way I remembered from being a girl, and out the back came a bale, tied on both strings. I let out a whoop like a kid.

When I came around the end of the first stretch, there was a flatbed trailer parked on the edge of the gravel road behind Josh’s pickup. He had pulled it over on his way to the plant.

My boys were standing on it, both of them, in their T-shirts and their caps.

I had not asked them. I had told them they could come if they wanted, but that it was hot and itchy and hard, and that nobody would think less of them for staying home with the air conditioner and their games.

“Dad hooked up the trailer before he left for work,” Wyatt said. “He said you’d need somebody to stack.”

Cole jumped down and grabbed the first bale with both hands, and it nearly pulled him over, and he got it up onto the trailer anyway. “These are heavy,” he said, amazed, like nobody had ever discovered it before.

“About fifty pounds,” I told him. “Ditch hay is light. Your grandpa’s alfalfa bales were seventy.”

“How many do we need?”

“Three hundred,” I said. “Grandma figures three hundred of these, with the cornstalks she can graze, will get her cows to grass. That’s about what fourteen of Uncle Brent’s big rounds would weigh.”

Cole stood there doing the arithmetic in his head with his lips moving. Then he asked, “Is Uncle Brent mad at Grandma?”

I thought about it before I answered. I did not want to give my son a villain.

Brent is his uncle, and Brent taught Wyatt to throw a spiral, and Brent will be at their weddings someday, God willing.