Field of Possibilities

I'm starting to get it.

A neighbor, who has the hay-cutting implements and baler that Miss Brenda doesn't see my need for (yet), has been making hay on my fields this week. Last evening as the sun dropped into, and fired, the low clouds to the west, I walked off the hill on which our home stands and down into the field-dotted bottoms behind. There is something about a field of new mown hay that reins in my attention and spurs my imagination. I think it is the possibilities that a clean field presents, that I like. I think I'm starting to understand why people who work the land love it so much.

With all the rain we got this year, the hay grew tall and thick, obscuring the possibilities behind jumbled jungles of green and tan. My sojourns to see what was going on in the back forty were increasingly limited to the walks around the field edges. By the middle of the summer I could barely see over the grass to the other side of most of my fields. Last night, I stood in the center of a cut field and turned slowly around, imagining I was standing in something different than just a hay field--perhaps this could be corn next year, or wheat, sunflowers, brown-top millet--the possibilities were endless.

But, I'm not a complete farmer, yet. The last thought I had before I turned my feet toward the house was, "I could bivouac a whole battalion in this field."