They’re finishing up the final cut of the year today. Three good cuttings this year. Jim cooked us all lunch, and as Grandma and I were standing by the picture-glass window watching them bale the biggest rows I’ve seen all year, I remembered the first cutting of the year. I remember it was early June and I was standing in the same place talking to Pop, who was lying in his bed and dying. He was sort of in and out of lucid talk by then, but somehow he knew when they started cutting the hay. If you go back in the archives of this blog I bet you can find the day they started cutting.
“They cut all the front fields yet?” he asked me. I humored him and went along with it, but I didn’t know they had actually started cutting yet. I was really hoping they’d get it done before he passed on, but I hadn’t seen them yet. It wasn’t until I walked outside later and heard the motors that I realized they really had started cutting! Somehow Pop knew. I’ve noticed that towards the end of life the person begins to sense things without their body. It’s the first stages of the morph back into omniscience.
Funny the things hay will bring to mind, isn’t it? I remember they started cutting a few days before Pop passed and loaded up the last bales the day of his funeral. Time passes differently on the farm. I remember the second cutting too. The first cutting without Pop, that’s why I remembered it. On the farm, different cues let you know what has elapsed, what has left, what has returned, what is going on. The cycle of life. First you notice the cycle, and then you look back and notice yourself and track where you’ve been floating. Sometimes it’s like watching a wet shirt in the washing machine go round and round and round.
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