Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [89]
“Tell Mr. Guinea to enjoy this,” I said as I handed the bag to Amy. “That’ll be the last bag.” She looked at me quizzically. Because the guinea pig is serving as training wheels for a future alleged horse, I thought it might be helpful to explain my reasoning through parallels drawn from the equine world. “The finest horse hay in the land costs 175 bucks a ton.” I was in full royal declarative mode. “The stuff we’re feeding that guinea pig costs $18,560 a ton!”
Seven years old, and she hesitated perhaps two nanoseconds to read the seams on the ball before smacking it straight back at the pitcher.
“So we should get a horse.”
Occasionally one is provided glimpses of the road ahead. I am hoping there are rest stops.
Still, for now I am in charge, so when I noticed patches of volunteer timothy sprouting in our overgrown lawn and out on the ridge, I did rejoice and sent forth my daughter to gather stalks together. Before handing off the clippers, I placed a hand on her shoulder and patiently explained the dynamics driving this decision. Before the monologue concluded, I had invoked principles of self-sufficiency, economies of scale, the comparative nutritive value of native grasses, footnotes from a nice little chart available through the county extension office, and—for zip—the fable of the grasshopper and the ant.
Amy found this unconvincing. So then I tried explaining it impatiently, and now there are tears on the lawn. Certainly I am economically justified in sending my seven-year-old out to harvest grass; one can additionally argue the case along the lines of physical exercise and personal responsibility and further defend it as a proactive move to ensure she gets her vitamin D. It is also possible that the poor girl is suffering the projections of my own fond memories.
I loved making hay.
Of course you don’t make hay, and in fact the only time we ever used the phrase was in the metaphorical sense: Gotta make hay while the sun shines! When my dad picked up the phone to call his friend and neighbor Jerry, he’d always say, “You gonna bale today?” And if the answer was yes, you also knew “You” meant “We,” and you went to looking for your haying gloves.
In the early days Dad cut hay with a simple sickle bar mower—basically a seven-foot rolled steel plank fitted with rapidly reciprocating blades. You can get the idea by placing the palm of one hand over the back of the other, fanning your fingers, and shuffling the top hand back and forth.
Dad ran the mower off the back of his small Ford Ferguson, where it could be raised and lowered by a set of arms extending from the tractor. The power was supplied by a splined shaft (called a power takeoff, or PTO) that protruded from the back of the tractor and spun a flywheel attached to a pitman bar. I was always captivated by the pitman linkage because it reminded me of the linkage I had seen on steam locomotives in the cowboy shows we watched at Grandma’s house. One end of the pitman bar was attached to the outer edge of the flywheel and therefore followed the circular path described by the flywheel. This caused the other end of the bar, which was flexibly attached to the sickle, to plunge back and forth, making the sickle bar do the same. When the tractor was operating at full throttle, the flywheel end of the pitman bar whirled to a transparent blur while the sickle end pistoned so furiously you expected it would yank the sickle in two. There was something magical about the way it converted rotary energy into linear energy—or, from a child’s point of view, a circle into a straight line.
Before he set out to cut hay, Dad would park the tractor in the yard, shift it to neutral, set the throttle to idle, engage the power takeoff, and then dismount the tractor to lubricate the sickle. Working with great care (leaving any tractor while the PTO is engaged is a supreme