Before the Gathering

For my mother, July 5, 2005


There is a certain valley just North of the Utah border in Idaho. The valley is small, pastoral. The highway runs along the mountains, and you look to the West across the valley, looking down, as if into a miniature landscape display. There are farms with their rows of poplars, a small, tidy town, and miles and miles of hayfields. Hayfields live and die in a constant cycle: they grow, are mown, are baled, then grow again. This cycle will happen three or four times in a season– the alfalfa grows, and just as the purple blossoms appear, it is mown down in rows and left to dry in the sun. This is a delicate time– if the mown hay is rained on, it will be ruined, unusable. If it is allowed to lie too long in the field without being baled, crucial nutrients are bleached out by the sun and lost. When the proper time comes, the golden hay is gathered and bound into bales according to the farmer’s need and the hay’s purpose. The bales lie, row on row, sometimes rectangular, sometimes round, always equal. The neat, even bales are left in the field, the new alfalfa already beginning to grow around them, until they can be gathered in and stored.
This is my favorite time– before the gathering. Row upon row of golden bales, neat, even, peaceful. Perhaps it is something in the quality of the light at haying time, as the afternoon sunlight catches the dust in the air, perhaps it is the promise of golden sustenance laid up for the dark winter months, perhaps it is the order in this process. I do not know, just that I am comforted by the sight.
In this certain valley, nestled among the haying fields, there is a cemetery. One might miss it. I don’t know how many times I did– it’s rows of even, rectangular stones mirror and become a part of the golden hayfields which surround it, their bales awaiting the gathering. The part of me that loves haying time is also the part of me that recognizes the connection between a hayfield and a cemetery. There is the laying up for the future, the delicate timeline of the cycle, and the knowledge that when it is time, the treasures that have been laid up will be brought forth, and that day will be golden.