Lessons from Youth

 

Carol and I were going from Astoria to Rushville on Route 24 when I saw this. We finished our business in Rushville and on our way home I stopped to take a picture. I told Carol it would be a blog post but I wasn’t sure at that point what I would write. 

The first thing that came to mind is how rarely you see anyone bale hay like this these days. Seems like everyone does those giant round bales that require no hand labor at all. I understand that. There are so few farm kids now and an even smaller percentage of them know hard physical labor. 

Having racked plenty of bales even at a distance you can appreciate a well stacked rack. Bouncing across a field and making turns to get on and off the road separate those who can rack from those who should hone their abilities in the barn mow. There is little more embarrassing than losing part of your load before the rack gets to the barn. 

I thought about all the time I had spent working on the rack or in the barn. There were plenty of lessons to be learned in both places. It was a long time ago but those lessons last a lifetime. Pay when I first started was $1.00 per hour. I think when I quit doing that regularly as a summer job it was $1.25 per hour. You felt good at the end of the day if you had $10.00. It made you appreciate the value of a dollar. Dew sets on hay in the evening and generally is fully dried until late morning or early afternoon. So work was always done in the heat of the day. No farmer wanted his hay rained on, hence the old saying. Make hay while the sun shines. When it was cut and on the ground they wanted it baled and in the barn. There was no delay and no messing around. There were other lessons. The work was hot and often miserable. You had to develop will power. You had to be stubborn. Willing to push your body beyond what you thought was possible. You understood strength of mind and body. I talked to many of my peers then who thought strength was how much weight you could lift one time. I have always felt the strong person is the one who is willing to lift a weight hundreds of times and carry it where it needs to go. It strengthens mind, body and spirit. I guess the last lesson is the satisfaction of looking back at the end of the day. You see a field bare of mowed hay and a barn full of well stacked bales. You know what you have done. You know you have done it well. You are comfortable in the knowledge that the money you were paid was well earned by the sweat of your brow. 

So when I see a hay rack stacked sitting in a field those are the thoughts that go through my head. It saddens me that too few of our youth have the opportunity to learn what I did.