STRAW AND HAY STACKS

AUGUST 1909

Man spends night in haystack. He started from Helena to Great Falls, Montana, in an automobile. The machine got stuck in a mud hole. He applied to a settler for a bed an supper but was told that he could find a bed in the haystack and could get a drink from the pump. When he did not appear at home, they sent out a search party. They found Mr. Hill and his chauffeur sound asleep in the hay.

A haystack is accomplished using a treshing machine which blows the straw or hay into a stack while separating the grain. Gust Opseth traveled about this time of year with his machinery for the trashing.

Have you every laid on the top of a freshly blown straw stack? The straw is golden and even on a chilly day in October, the sun warms you. The stack on our farm was for the ponies and the stallion, Torpedo who liked to climb to the top. The trashing machine does not get all the oats off the straw and he must have found good pickings at the top.

One would never allow big horses to eat that many oats but for ponies, all they do is fatten up for winter and have healthy colts in the spring.

Recently, on a day trip off the highways, we found those golden bales shimmering in the afternoon sun. Shirley told me in an email that little bales were a thing of the past, except for flax straw, which was baled and used around the foundation of houses for insulation. She went on to say people don't bank their houses like that anymore.

Have you ever seen a house banked with bales? It was a common site for decades in Minnesota. People with trailer houses did it as well. Outside dog houses were stuffed with straw which acted like an insulation as well. Our collie/shepard mix would stand by and whine, excited about making a tunnel in the straw, as did your beagle in Kansas. Look again at the big bales, Shirley told me their dog dug into the middle of one for shelter!

It is a melancholy time of the year for Tom and I. The grains are being harvested. Along the ditches of our two and a half hour drive to the lake, signs of summer ending appear. The sumac is beginning to turn red. The young geese are making small flights. In Maplewood State Park, as you look across from a viewing pull off, you can see the maple trees are a different color than the oaks. It is a subtle change, but a change, nevertheless. In this part of the country, which had a late spring, summer hurried itself along to make certain the maturity happened before the first frost.

We are hopeful we have a long fall. Fishing soon will be small lakes around Fargo on the Minnesota side. Please, Mr. Weatherman, don't make us have to wear a long, down coat until October.

We just may have to find a straw stack or bale to burrow into.

e