Coffee is restful

When I was a kid, the day after a soaking summertime rain brought a respite from work on our family's dairy farm. After all, you couldn't do fieldwork or haul manure.

Darn! I guess we have no choice but to sprawl on the living room floor and watch "Roadrunner and Coyote" reruns.

A farm wife once told me, "Coffee is restful." Perceiving my puzzlement, she explained, "You have a cup of coffee, you get some rest. You have another cup of coffee and you get more rest."

I couldn't argue with her logic. It helped that we shared a love of java.

A timeworn truism states that rain makes grain. A corollary to that is that rain makes hay. Dairy farmers know that hay also makes work. I hate to say this but it's true: when my seven siblings and I were growing up, our parents routinely flouted child labor laws. As soon as a kid could carry a bucket or a bale, he or she was put to work.

I complained loudly and often about the injustice of being forced to work for free. Dad countered that working on our farm was a privilege and that I should be paying him. After all, he said, I was receiving free on-the-job training.

As I grew I became adept in the fine art of throwing and stacking bales of hay, building muscles and character beneath the scorching summer sun. Word must have gotten out when I reached my teens that I possessed a strong back and a weak mind because neighboring farmers began to hire me to help with haying.

One such neighbor was Dave Wosje, who had a quarter-section of hay ground adjacent to our farm. Wosie would mow, rake, and bale his hay, dropping the rectangular blocks of fodder onto the field, forming rows that looked like the dotted centerlines of a vast emerald highway. The bales needed to be picked up, stacked on a hay wagon, and taken to his farm for storage. He also needed someone to help him, preferably somebody with a muscular back and a malleable mind, so he hired me.

Wosie's wife, Linda, piloted their John Deere "3010" and hay wagon past the rows of bales as he walked alongside the flatbed and tossed the bales onto the lumbering wagon. My job was to stack the hay in such a manner that the wagon achieved its maximum capacity of bales without any of them tumbling off.

I quickly assumed that with Dave being shorter than me and built like a fireplug that I wouldn't have any trouble keeping up with the stacking situation. I also presumed, given his stature, that we would collect only a few layers of bales on the flatbed before we quit.

I was mistaken on both accounts.

It was astonishing how incredibly busy this kept me. I would barely get one bale stacked when the next one would thump against my ankles.

There were soon four layers of bales on the flatbed, then five. The height of the load reached several feet above Dave's head. Surely, I thought, he would soon run out of steam and we could take the load home and enjoy a restful coffee break.

But alas, no. Bales continued arriving at the top of the load as if being shot out of a cannon. I had to pay close attention for fear of being knocked off the top of the stack.

When Dave finally decided that the flatbed was full, Linda turned the "3010" toward the Wosje farm. Dave and Linda rode together on the tractor while I sat atop the teetering wagonload of hay. Every bump in the road tested my stacking skills. The load somehow held.

Upon arriving at the Wosje farmstead, Linda went into the house while Dave backed the flatbed into his hay storage area. Our roles were reversed as I tossed bales while Dave formed them into a stack. Despite my best efforts to best him, Dave had no trouble keeping up.

Once all the bales were stacked, Linda served a hearty dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy. I couldn't fathom how she managed to prepare such a scrumptious meal while driving the tractor.

After we had finished eating, Linda retrieved a mysterious loaf from the freezer. She cut it into slices that revealed pinwheel-like swirls of chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream.

The three of us noshed on the frosty treat and enjoyed several cups' worth of rest.