Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [92]
Back here in Fall Creek, out there in the beating sun, Amy is trudging through the grass as if she is being press-ganged into the Volga boatmen. Perhaps this is not the time to tell her haybine stories. I grab a second set of clippers and join her. We snip away together until her little red wagon is full with timothy, which we take to the asphalt in front of the garage and lay out to cure.
This is the time of year when the countryside truly thumbs its nose at the subzero purge of winter. The greenery is full-blown, the dew-drenched mornings reverberate with a tropical chirp and twitter, and everywhere there are babies: tiny rabbits beneath the apple tree, speckle-chested robins begging worms from mama, a spotted fawn by the mailbox down the driveway, and now and then a glimpse of the pheasant hen leading her loyal brood. From my desk I can hear the squeak of the swing as Amy bobs above the valley and the horizon beyond, and my heart is so light to hear this all through the open screens that I start singing along with the music I am playing, and so it is that Anneliese stops outside my office window and lets me finish a full chorus of Supertramp’s “Give a Little Bit” before she politely knocks and enters, tickled to have caught me so unguarded and also I suppose to find me with an unknotted brow. “Oh, don’t stop!” Anneliese says as I kick the volume down, and while the blush is still leaving my face she sits on my lap and with my arms around her, we talk like we haven’t in a while. There is no question that I have bitten off more than I can chew this year, but there is no turning back now, and as we talk about how it’s going, we have a chance in this five minutes to look each other in the eye and end by saying we love each other. Then the baby is crying on the monitor I keep out here on the bookshelf, but the thing that feels good as I watch my wife leave is that we are in this together. That night when I walk to the house after dark the entire valley right up to the yard is pulsing with fireflies.
If conditions were right, hay cut one day could be baled the next, but first it had to be raked. Rolling the hay with the rake flipped it off the moist ground where it had lain all night and fluffed it up so it might catch the breeze more easily; it also left the hay in a narrower strand that better fit the baler. We usually began raking by mid-morning, after the dew had come off. And we all loved to rake, because when you raked you got to drive the Johnny-Popper.
The equivalency is not absolute, but I’ll pretty much guarantee you most farm kids remember their first moment at the wheel of a tractor with the approximate clarity of their first kiss. Me? Lisa Kettering, beneath a white pine in the moonlight on the road to Axehandle Lake, and Jerry Coubal’s John Deere B through the gate beside the Norway pine with the pigtail twist. Nicknamed Johnny-Popper because of the distinctive two-cylinder pop-pop-pop of the exhaust, the tractor was a gangly-looking machine with tall rear wheels and a slim front end supported by two small wheels cambered to a narrow vee. The steering wheel was mounted in the near perpendicular and stood flat before your face like a clock on the wall. The square padded seat sat level with the top of the towering