It’s haying time. But I am only an observer. Others work hard in the field to harvest the sweet grasses and the late summer flowers into large, round bales for winter livestock.
All summer I have walked the paths in the fields. The grass has grown up alongside and flowers have blossomed and faded. The meadow larks rise and fall into the depths of the grass as they lure me away from their nest. The red-winged black birds hold onto the tall, stiff reeds of grasses and bob with the wind, watching me as I pass through their domain.
But now the grass is ready to be cut. The bugs will fly up, and the birds will fly down to catch them. The young birds have fledged and are able to take part in the feast. But they will return to a strange earth cut from a sea of waving stems to a crackling stubble.
This is not a bleak picture but a picture of a cycle that has interwoven the grass, the farmer, and the meadow lark and the other birds that live in the grassy fields. It’s late summer, and it’s time to cut the grass.
Last winter I was flying into Dulles airport returning from a job in California. I looked out onto the rolling hills of piedmont Virginia where the fields rise slowly up to meet the Blue Ridge Mountains. There was a dusting of snow over the landscape. Something caught my eye which I had not seen before. In several places dotted on the landscape below were large brown stars on the fields. There was a mixture of designs. Some stars had six arms radiating from a central point. Others had four or five arms. They were all somewhat symmetrical. But what were they? I could see that each star radiated from the crest of a small hill with the arms of the stars reaching out and down the hill. From my perspective of several thousand feet in the air each arm may have been up to 100 feet long. The arms were brown and textured and in some places the snow showed through.
“There’s another one,” I said to myself. Looking further out I could see others as they came into the view of the descending plane. Soon though, the open fields and winter wood lots gave way to suburbs with their tangle of roads and snow dusted roofs.
What I was seeing was the result of haying. The large round hay bales had been taken to the top of small hills and rolled outward to form the stars. The hay was now available to the livestock. Perhaps it was hay cut the year before from the fields I was gazing at now.
The grasses in these fields are harvested under a hay lease from the National Park of which the fields I walk in are a part. The farmer pays the Park Service for the right to harvest the hay which they then use or sell. The funds help support this park and other parks in the national system. And the haying keeps the historic vistas open. It is also part of the centuries old cycle of the ground and the grass and the bird and the farmer. I am a witness to the covenant between man and nature. We care for the Earth and nature, and it supports us in its growth and regrowth.
Robert Frost in his poem Mowing speaks for the scythe whispering to the grass. What secret do they share? It is the secret of the covenant. It is the tale of the blade returning to the grass each year and the rejuvenation of the grass to receive it. It is a promise to return year after year to the haying. And to whisper.
This excellent video tells of the hard work of the haying covenant between the farmer and the Earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwl-YLvru1s
The art work is based on a screen shot from the referenced video.
Robert Frost’s poem Mowing may be found at the Poetry Foundation site at – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53001/mowing-56d231eca88cd