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| A giant's marshmallow aka wrapped round bale |
I guess if given the choice betwixt grey and coolish and bathtub hot and humid and garbage smelling and conducive to large terrifying caca-roaches, I am going to choose the former. But COME ON, Vermont. Get your shit together already! In other news, evidently I'm getting closer to becoming a real live Vermonter in that all the fuck I have to talk about is the weather.
Hooray?
As any farmer type will tell you, the real problem with this rainy-ass season (aside from its propensity for making even the cheeriest of people into depressives and the doom-and-gloomers into unparalleled delights) is that it fucks with one's ability to hay. Yes, you read that right, hay is a verb. And it is SERIOUS business round these parts. If you'll recall, my first attempt to visit Lazy Lady Farm was thwarted by a string of nice days that required intense haying and thus negated Laini's ability to host me as a visitor. Now that I live up here and am proximate to all the hullabaloo that surrounds this activity, I understand that "make hay while the sun shines" is a literal actual thing. In an ideal world, you must have three consecutive days of warm, dry weather in order to get your grass cut, "tedded" or spread out to dry, and then rolled and wrapped into big round bales or pressed and tied into square bales. It's essential to make sure your hay is dry before wrapping, because any moisture can lead to fermentation, which is not good for the goats and also can result in SPONTANEOUS FUCKING COMBUSTION I KID YOU NOT.
Last week we happened upon a haying day, which meant that Laini and Barry were out in the field from about 1 pm til about 10:30 pm, and I was left to do chores and milking by myself. When I left the farm at 9, they were out there with literal flashlights, going great guns.
In addition to producing monstrous anxiety, haying can also be the source of contentious political fault lines. Around here, there's seemingly boundless local lore regarding people who were haying other peoples' fields without permission or doing so with permission for free but then selling the hay to other people on the sly, or people promising people a certain amount of hay from their fields and then going back on their promises and creating acrimonious rifts. Then there's the borrowing of equipment, the breaking of said equipment, and all the attendant drama therein. Haying is no goddamned joke.
In the barn, we're in the process of using up bales of first cut hay from last year, partly because we need to preserve the more deluxe 2nd cut for the kids to eat and partly because now that the girls are out on pasture, they don't need anything as rich as 2nd or 3rd cut, the caviar of hay. Just when I thought I was done with 1st cut until next winter, it's back wreaking havoc on my respiratory system and epidermis. Oh what a world.
So today marks the longest day of the year, which to some is a non-event and to others is a cause for pagan-ish celebration. But to your glass-half-empty narrator and her like-minded cohorts, it means that from here on out the days get shorter, and winter is coming. Yes. Winter. Is. Coming. Seems like a preposterous thing to start dreading when the first tomatoes haven't even come in from the garden yet, but I like to get a jump on worrying about things nice and early so I have plenty of time to really sharpen and refine my plaintive whining. I'm no procrastinator! Ugh. The one thing I was able to comfort myself with on those long drawn out days of winter was that things were on the incline. Even though it started getting dark at 3:30, we were gaining minutes of daylight every day. It's been positively glorious leaving the farm well after 8 and still seeing the pale washed pink of the sky behind the mountains. It's all goddamned downhill from here.
Let's blame the grey dreary weather on my bad attitude, okay? Shit is real up here in the north country! Just this weekend I was hanging out with some bros in Montreal (where I drank myself into oblivion and reconnected with my youthful barf-scapades on this, the eve of my turning officially mid-thirties). My friend Jules used to live in Montreal and was recounting a statistic about how most suicides there happen in November and February, either when people can't bear to head into another long winter, or when, three months in, they are confronted with the fact that it is in fact only half over. Such are the perils of living at this latitude. We really fucking earn our spectacular autumns and splendiferous natural beauty.
Tune in next week when I plan on complaining about how green everything is and how good the air smells and how hard it is to use up all the fruits and vegetables growing in my back yard garden and how much it sucks to be healthy and able-bodied. #toughlife #pleaseshutup
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