The Straw Bale Maze We Built on Halloween

Friday evening

The school had its costume parade Friday afternoon, the way it does on the last school day before Halloween. The kids came off the bus at three forty still in their costumes, faces half painted.

I told them to go change. They did not. They dropped their backpacks in the lane and came straight out into the field and started carrying bales with the big kids, still dressed up.

By six, most of the help had gone home to milk or to eat supper. The high school kids had gone.

Lance was out on his last straw run. It was just the three of us, out in the swath, setting the last few walls by the center.

The sky went orange over the standing corn.

It was one of those October evenings in Wisconsin that you only get three or four of a year, cold and still, the light coming in low and gold across the stubble.

Hope and I would lift a bale between us and set it, and Reid would push on the end to square it up, very serious about it.

He had straw in his hair and in his costume and probably in his ears.

He stopped with his arms around a bale that was half his size. He looked down the swath, toward the end of the field where his uncle had turned the combine around.

“Mom. Is Uncle Dan mad at us forever?”

I set my end of the bale down. I did not want to lie to him, and I did not know the truth.

“I don’t know, bud,” I said. “I think he’s mad at me. Not at you. I did something without asking him, and it hurt his feelings.”

Reid thought about that. “Did you say sorry?”

“Not yet.”

“You should say sorry,” he said, and picked up his bale again, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned.