Event Date: Summer 1980–1982 (approx.)

Event Date: Summer 1980–1982 (approx.) Drafted: 2025-11-23

Hay days were our family’s version of a festival — noisy, sweaty, communal, and threaded with a kind of old-world pageantry that doesn’t exist anymore.

The machinery we used was ancient even then: the old Allis-Chalmers tractor, the wooden hay wagon, and behind that, the curious rake-and-lift contraption whose real name I never learned. It looked like something from a museum — a wooden ribcage on wheels, clawing up hay from the field and dropping it into the wagon in great clattering armfuls.

Cars would pull over on the side of Van Laanen Road just to watch. That’s how old-fashioned our operation was.

The adults — uncles, aunts, neighbors, friends — walked alongside the wagon with pitchforks, rescuing the hay that spilled, tossing it up, laughing, shouting directions, sweating through T-shirts. Dad drove the tractor, steady as a captain on a ship.

We kids had the sacred job of stomping down the hay, packing it tight so the wagon could hold more. It was hot, dusty, glorious work. Every stomp made us feel strong and important — part of the machine, part of the day, part of history.

When the wagon reached the barn, the haymow took over the magic.

The great metal hook — suspended from the rafters like something out of a pirate ship — would plunge into the mound of hay and lift entire forkfuls toward the haymow. It was mesmerizing. Dangerous. Beautiful. We stayed well back for that part.

But once the hay was safely dumped inside, it became our kingdom.

We tunneled through the piles. We dove from the beams. We swung on thick barn ropes, launching ourselves into the sweet-smelling abyss.

There was a hidden piece of machinery under one section — a rusty seeder — so Dad stuck a ridiculously long 2x4 out of the hay to warn us. The 2x4 was itself a hazard, of course, but that was childhood on our farm: danger wrapped in enchantment, and enchantment wrapped in danger.

Mom brought lemonade in mason jars, sweating in the heat. Everyone drank like it was holy water.

Those hay days felt enormous. Mythic. The kind of days where you don’t just remember the smell of hay — you remember the sunlight coming through it.