Make hay while the sun shines

(a preview of my first adult fiction book, Tangled Web a novel, due out in September)

           

 I watched the world go by, standing at the back of the hay wagon, or at least our corner of the world. It was an amazing day! Summer blue sky stretched on into infinity. A cooling breeze brushed past my face and touched the leaves of the quaking aspen at the edge of the field. They fluttered and twirled, whispering on their flexible stems. As we rolled past the pasture fences, the sheep raised their heads to watch us. Stupid was grazing right along the woven wire grid of the fence line, tempting fate.

The alfalfa plants that had escaped the path of the mower were blooming, colors shading from light lavender, all the way through the purples to dark, midnight blue. Yellow sulfur butterflies floated from flower to flower. The scent of the alfalfa flowers carried by the breeze was sweet, and somehow, green.

I smiled at Mindy as she dragged a bale from the baler chute at the front of the wagon to me at the back. "Doesn't the air smell great?" I asked. She took a deep breath and sneezed. "Stand back here by me,” I added, “so you can smell the air before it picks up all those little bits of hay."

Mindy staggered a bit as the tractor pulled us over a rock in the field. "Mom, I think you have strange ideas about haying."

"What do you mean?"

"Well," Mindy explained. "I think it's fun when cool guys come to help us."

"You mean like Arlene's son, Gavin, or Mick and Tony?"

"Yeah. They're fun to work with. But I don't get all excited about the smell of the air or the flowers at the edge of the field.” We bumped over another rock and staggered to regain our balance. I grabbed at Mindy’s shoulder to steady her.

"Mom, look!" Mindy pointed over my shoulder, suddenly excited. "A deer!" A tiny fawn sprinted toward the brush at the edge of the field. His long legs wobbled. He stopped, looked back at us and then took off again, vanishing under the draping leaves of a willow.

"Wow, that's the first time I've seen a fawn in the hay field," I said, awed.

"It was sleeping in a windrow," Mindy interrupted. "I didn't see anything, and then suddenly it jumped to its feet right in front of us and raced off, just before the baler picked up the hay it was lying in."

"It was exactly the same color as the hay in the windrows," I said.  "If we hadn't had rain on this hay it would still be green and the fawn wouldn't have been able to hide there. Neat."

Mindy and I looked at each other and smiled. Then she turned to grab the next bale.