Twelve sheaves to a stook

They say that people who live by the seashore stop hearing the waves. My take is that in all walks of life, reiterated patterns and the hum effect dulls awareness; routine desensitizes. We get a nudge to somehow change it up, seek pause, find retreat in whatever form. I like to hyphenate words such as recreation in an attempt to understand them more fully, in this case the clearer meaning for me is to re-create.

Back in March of this year, the calendar start of our COVID-times lockdown, while instinctively signing up to help out at the front door of a large supermarket, my task turned into a personally welcomed awakening and purview into the rhythm of the lives of others. After engaging for twenty weeks in a regular schedule though, my nature began rebelling against repetitive structure. Making a conscious decision to step back sometimes prompts a subconscious chatter listing untruths that seemingly attempt to lay guilt about not being productive and so forth. Nonetheless, mental wellness trumps all, and so time-out was my call. Besides loafing, I’ve been taking in new and not- so-new vistas and doings. If I were wealthy and living in Roman times a vacation— the word meaning to be empty, to be free—could easily run for two years. Easy to take!

I quickly replenish with the aid of an open schedule and spreading horizons: the simple notice of the landscape beckons that I transform with it—the sculpting hand of shadows; late day gliding light; new-shorn fields of unending combed ridges; the quieted drape of velveteen land over ragged limestone. At present, mostly what I see are the square bales of harvested hay; bales bigger than before; 800-1500 pounds large; twenty five on each of two tractor- pulled wagons moving past my view. There seems to be a trend back to the square bale as opposed to the practice of round bales wrapped in white plastic; the aesthetic of harvested fields has gained with the move. Likened to a pop-up art installation I witness giant square bullion standing on end, like the bumps on a dinosaur tail disappearing over a round of terrain then escaping into mysterious woods; Neolithic long barrows on antique land, earthen monuments, tokens of who and when.

Fireflies now gone, I hear the crickets of evening as the outer limbs of tall walnut trees reach for the August moon; by morning the ring of cicadas predicts heat for this day while the command of the ravens soon take charge of the soundscape. Set up in a comfortable chair under those same trees, reading is a true magic mountain for me. Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize recipient for literary criticism says that, “the world is a library of strange and wonderful books,” and the great books are, “those we want to spend our lives with because they never cease to reward our devotion.”

What I find is that many of life experiences are déjà vu in the sense that throughout our days, in perhaps a garden, a vista, gallery, wilderness, a people or animal encounter, there are moments where we sense we have been there before, where we acknowledge something that feels simultaneously new and old. I attribute those instances to a rejoining of spirit, of re-cognition of elements of our lives that remain to console and nurture; a reawakening of the senses. The rattle of a chain guard on a bicycle, a song, the scent of pipe tobacco, the fog over a seascape holds true to me as was the call of coyotes a primal reminder of the wild for my late dog Cabot as the hair on his back stood on end.

So my observation of haying led me to the farmhouse door of a veteran of the land. Tanned and heavy around the belly, Wayne’s rounded shoulders were inherited from seven decades of farming. While he connected the process of round baling to plastic use—sealed off from oxygen the hay ferments to silage, which contains more nutrients—he estimated that square bales in whatever size were always easier to handle. Out back of his house and gazing over the never-ending shorn fields, his eldest daughter now manages, the sweet scent in the air returned him to his days as an early teen. “We’d stook by hand back then,” he began. “Used horses to cut, then our first tractor, a little grey Fergie, the (model) ‘20’,” he said. Wayne went on about change. “That Henry Ferguson was a genius advancing everyone with new attachments for his three-point hitch invention, things that no one ever saw before.” Wayne strode about telling how the harvester back then cut the wheat-hay into bunches, sheaves that lay flat on the ground in rows, rows that sometimes in the heat of a day, “felt like they was a hunred miles long.” He looked out to the beyond as he continued to speak. “Ya walked the rows then stood two sheaves up that were taller than I was. Ya leaned them head to head, then leaned another 2 opposite, all sloped like a tepee.” It was somehow easy to picture the young kid Wayne out there in those ancestral fields. He turned his eyes toward me. “Ya kept goin’ around until 12 sheaves made up a stook and when done a few rows the wagon I’d come to pick ‘em up before rain,” he said returning his gaze to the ether. “Yes sir, 12 sheaves to the stook,” he repeated.

As I walked back to my truck that day, the house wrens were anxious as they flew in the shadows of the east side of the barn. I checked to find Wayne remaining where he stood, silhouetted against a parade of large bales that trailed into the sky. But the golden stooks that he had re-called were also there; each one upright proud and shaped by working hands, each one a family gathering, 12 sheaves to the stook. In that moment, I was fine.