Making hay while ...?

It rained (again) this morning. Thunderstorms are in tomorrow afternoon’s forecast. Lots of hay fields around here have their first cutting of hay lying in rows to dry or sitting in round bales. All of the above makes me glad I’m not a farmer trying to make hay, cause the sun isn’t shining much these days.

farmer baling hay

Photo by J. Harrington

Cornfields look happy, though it’s dicey if corn will be knee high by the Fourth of July. According to recent reports from the mosquito control district, this is becoming (has become?) a banner year for mosquitos. If the “hot sports” are several counties south of us, I don’t want to know how thick the flocks of the “state bird” are down there.

Since weather is, tragically😉, limiting today’s outdoor chore possibilities, I mixed up a batch of sourdough that’s now rising. Early tomorrow, before the day heats up, we’ll bake a loaf of artisan sourdough using a recipe we’ve neglected for a couple of years now. Slices of that’ll serve as breakfast for several days and help keep me away from too many cookies.

Haymaking

By Edward Thomas

Aftear night’s thunder far away had rolled

The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,

And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,

Like the first gods before they made the world

And misery, swimming the stormless sea

In beauty and in divine gaiety.

The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn

With leaves—the holly’s Autumn falls in June—

And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.

The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit

With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd

Of children pouring out of school aloud.

And in the little thickets where a sleeper

For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper

And garden warbler sang unceasingly;

While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee

The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow

As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.

Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown

Travelled the road. In the field sloping down,

Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,

Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook

Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood

Without its team, it seemed it never would

Move from the shadow of that single yew.

The team, as still, until their task was due,

Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade

That three squat oaks mid-field together made

Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,

And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but

Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.

The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,

But still. And all were silent. All was old,

This morning time, with a great age untold,

Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,

Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,

A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.

Under the heavens that know not what years be

The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements

Uttered even what they will in times far hence—

All of us gone out of the reach of change—

Immortal in a picture of an old grange.

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