The entry about Fall the other day brought back another interesting memory...

When my sister and I were little we lived in a house with my mom and dad in a little town called Rockwood, which was just outside of Milton and Campleville and all that... We had a house with a huge backyard that was all fenced in, and all around us were fields from the farms nearby - acres and acres of hay fields as far as you could see. It was like we had our whole life inside these little boundaries, our own little island in a waving brown sea.

Some time in the year these big machines would come and cut the tall grass and bundle it into blocks, and later on in the years the machines began to make huge rolls instead. It was fascinating to watch these big beasts lumber through the fields, making their rhythmic roaring noise, eating up the grass at one end and dumping a huge roll of hay out the other end! The bales were huge, and wound in tight spirals. The beasts would leave their droppings all over the field, and after some days or weeks, a different machine would come back. I would watch this machine wander here and there as it ate bales that would disappear inside its belly. When the fields were picked clean, the machine would wander off into the distance, hunting for more.

Sometimes when the bales would sit alone in the fields, drying in the sun, my mother would take my sister and I out to walk. After being cut, the tall brown grasses became short and hard.. it was like walking on a giant cheek of stubbly whiskers. The stubs of dry, cut grass would scratch at the soft skin of our ankles, leaving bright pink and red welts and scratches with powdery bits of shredded skin. You wouldn't feel it as you ran through the grass whiskers and climbed on the huge, scratchy bales of hay. It smelled so good, that same musky smell like the wet leaves, but this one was more pungent, more like the earth and less like sugar. You could stand on top of one of these hay bales, they were taller than I was at 8 years of age, and you could see forever... the endless seas of short grass, no longer waving in the breezes, pock-marked with dots of hay bales. When you were looking at the field you were standing in, the bales seem to have been placed randomly, but standing on top of one and seeing the whole picture, you could pick out a rough pattern of ragged, diagonal, dotted lines.

After a walk among the grass and hay bales, my sister and I would swim in the pool, wincing and whimpering as the chlorine stung at the scratches made by the cut grass. It would put a real damper on the swimming, which we normally found a lot of fun.. I always had a low tolerance for pain back then... but we'd be out again another day, running through the grass and scratching our ankles. It didn't seem to matter -- the rare diversion in our daily routine was worth it.

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