I was tired yesterday. I mean REALLY tired. I had been up early and to bed late the previous, well…multitude of days. Perhaps that goes a long way to explain what I’m about to say. Or perhaps not.

As I was driving home from Grove City (yes, again) yesterday, I saw someone mowing a field of what was probably supposed to be hay. It was next door to a fairly new shopping plaza, so I assume that a developer owns it, but the previous owner’s hay crop still grows there. The field must have been chock full of sweet clover, and it smelled wonderful. It was at that point that I realized that I’ll most likely never bale hay (or straw) with my dad again. And it made me sad to the point that I almost started to cry.

The last time I was home, Dad told me he’d sold the hay baler. The old baler hadn’t been used in several years, but it had given decades of service to our family. I think Dad had been hanging onto it more out of devotion than necessity. But after several offers, he finally decided to sell it to a neighbor. Now I’ll be the first to admit that there was a time when I hated baling hay more than just about anything else, and would have been glad to see that baler go. But the last few times I helped bale, it was actually fun. Sure, it was hard work, but it satisfied the way most other work doesn’t. I suppose I could find some farmer who needed help at some point during the summer and take it up again, but it wouldn’t be the same without Dad.

Dad, you see, has a particular way of farming. Like most men, he has his messy side (take a look in the farm shop for a prime example). But when it comes to field work of any kind, Dad is just about as particular as I am with my car, and that’s saying a lot. Rows have to be straight, there can be no missed spots, waterways need to be mowed, fence rows need to be sprayed. The same mentality carried over to baling hay.

Most folks who bale hay simply stack wagons 5 bales high in whatever fashion they see fit. They stack hay in the mow in similar fashion. But not Dad. He had a system. The wagons were always stacked in the same fashion and were put together with the precision of a puzzle. This allowed him to stack wagons 6 or even 7 layers high. You could book down the road at a blazing 15 mph (hey, that’s fast in a tractor) and not worry about a single bale falling off. But the real masterpiece was the hay mow itself. Watching Dad fill the mow (which was actually just a hay stack from floor to ceiling) was like watching a master Tetris player. He’d hold back long or short bales and wait for the perfect moment to use them to fill a spot. Though he’d occassionally get in a pickle, I guarantee that barn was stacked tighter than any other in the county. And I loved it. It was exactly the way I’d do it.

My wife and my mom say I’m just like my dad. In reality, it’s my little brother that is my dad’s clone, but I’ll admit I have some of his traits. One of them is the apparent inability to do certain jobs halfway. Even baling hay. And, for some reason, a job well done — whatever the job — is fun. And for that reason, I’m going to miss baling hay with my dad.

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