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By Root 373 0

the obsessive-compulsive beast? How clean the field looks when the last wagon departs. The stubble remains slanted in the direction of the last pass, and as on a checker-mowed lawn, you can read the bend of the stems and see how the day progressed. On tight corners the haybine always missed little bed-head tufts of hay. They bugged me like a collar sticking up, so sometimes I tried to trim them when I was done, but this plugged the sickle, so I’d have to shudder and drive home. But still: at the end of it all, you had the very green manifestation of summer swept cleanly from the field, pressed into cubes, and stowed in square corners against the winter. Every time I stack firewood, there is this moment at the finish when I step back and survey the neat row, and a yogalike calm fills me. It is the same with the hay pile. You look at it, and you think, Well, whatever the winter brings, we’ve got our hay up.

I spare Amy the bulk of my hayseed memories, but I do teach her to twist the timothy and listen for the crackle, to gauge the dryness against her palm. When it is ready, we pack it tightly into a cardboard box, and store the box on a shelf in the pump house, up off the ground so it doesn’t reabsorb any moisture. The first day we fill the box maybe halfway. “There!” says Amy triumphantly. “If we’re going to feed Guinea all winter, we’re going to need at least three more boxes,” I say. Her head and shoulders immediately droop. I call this slumpage. Slumpage drives me nuts, and as such I recently decreed that all slumpage would henceforth cease. So much for the dictatorship.

For all my talk of making hay and rites of passage, when my father calls and says he needs a hand getting the hay in this year, it is Anneliese who packs the kids and drives north, leaving me to write. Growing up in the valley across the way, she and her sister used to work on the hay crew for Tom, the old farmer down the road, so she can throw bales. We still visit Tom and his wife now and then, and he’s always got plenty of stories. Once early on before Anneliese and I were married but headed that way, Tom pulled me aside and told me Anneliese and her sister had outworked most of the boys he ever hired. “One day they told me they were tired of working with Stevie Wonder,” Tom said. “There wasn’t anybody on the crew named Steve, so I said, Who are you talking about? They pointed to this young fellow who wasn’t doing much.” He was grinning now, anticipating the punch line. “They told me, ‘Every time he puts down a hay bale, we Wonder if he’ll ever pick up another one!’“

In late June we drive across the state for a family wedding and a working vacation. The wedding reception is held in a beautifully preserved old barn, and it’s fun to watch my dad and brothers standing at the edge of the dance floor scoping the timbers and speculating on how the barn was constructed. The next morning we drive up the Door County Peninsula and take a car ferry to Washington Island, where I am to give a talk and perform my first ever solo concert. I am nervous before the concert, as it is the first time I will have ever appeared with just my guitar and no one else to remember verses or play over my mistakes, but it’s a passable show and I enjoy it once I relax. Coincidentally, the show is held in a converted barn. Our hosts put us up in a log cabin beside Lake Michigan. There are sandhill cranes on the lawn and goslings at the dock. Our friend Dan comes by with a pink Washington Island sweatshirt for Jane, and we visit until after dark. I have a chance to write in the Red Cup Coffee Shop, and we take Amy to see the smooth stones of Schoolhouse Beach. It is a good couple of days, but there is also that jolt of realizing how much world there is to drink in, and how much I miss when I get stuck in the vortex of my own just-in-time commitments. At the concert Amy takes a picture of Jane sleeping on Anneliese’s shoulder as I sing. Later when I look at it I see Anneliese is smiling, her eyes bright, the way I remember them from the very first days of our courtship. Here