Putting Up Hay

Late summer into fall is when a lot of outfits across the West are getting the last cutting of hay put up.

If you have never put up hay, here is the short version. You cut it when the weather looks like it will hold. You let it lie and cure in the sun and hope it does not rain on it. You rake it, you bale it, and then comes the part nobody makes a movie about: you haul it in and stack it. Bale after bale, in the hottest stretch of the year, into a barn that already feels like an oven. Your forearms itch, your shirt is soaked through by nine in the morning, and there is no finish line you can see — just the next bale, and the one behind it.

And here is the strange thing about that work. Nothing needs it yet. The grass is still green. The stock are fat and grazing. If you skipped the whole business and went fishing, nobody would notice for months.

They would notice in February.

Anybody who has fed through a hard winter knows what a full hay barn feels like at the end of a cold day. It does not feel like much. It feels like nothing at all, which is exactly the point. The crisis that never happens does not make any noise. The work that prevented it got done back in the heat, when it was the last thing anybody wanted to do. And in a dry year, when the second cutting never came, every bale in that barn is worth more than the truck parked next to it.

The ants have it figured out

There is a stretch near the end of Proverbs where the writer lists four small creatures he says are wiser than they look. The first one is the ant:

“The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer;” — Proverbs 30:25

We keep coming back to two words in there. The first is not strong. The verse does not pretend the ants are impressive. They are not the biggest thing in the pasture. They are small, and the writer says so plainly. What makes them wise is not power. It is timing. They do the gathering while the gathering can be done.

The second word is summer. They prepare in the season of plenty, when it would be easy not to. Not in the panic of the first cold snap. Not the night before the storm. In the summer, when the sun is out and the need is invisible and the excuse to put it off is sitting right there in the shade.

That is haying. But it is a lot of other things too.

What we are chewing on this week

Most of what carries a person through a hard month got stacked up quietly in an easy one. Nobody builds a marriage during the fight; they build it in a hundred ordinary evenings before the fight ever comes. Nobody gets strong the day they need to lift the thing. Nobody finds a friend at two in the morning that they never bothered to call at two in the afternoon. And the folks we know whose faith held when the floor dropped out — it was not because they got serious in the emergency. It was because they had been putting up hay for years. A little prayer in the morning. A few verses on a day when nothing was wrong. Showing up on a Sunday when they could have slept in and no one would have known.

We will be honest: this one stings a little at our place, because it is not our natural habit. It is a lot easier to run at a crisis than to stack bales against one that has not shown up yet. The crisis at least feels urgent. The barn work just feels like work.

But the ant is not strong, and the ant does fine. That is the encouraging part. You do not have to be the toughest hand on the crew to be ready for winter. You just have to use the summer.

The small try for the week

Pick one thing you know you will need later and do not need yet. Maybe it is a hard conversation you keep putting off because things are fine right now. Maybe it is a habit — ten minutes of quiet before the day starts, a walk, a phone call to a parent, a few dollars set aside, a chapter of something worth reading. Then put up one bale of it every day this week. Not a barn full. One bale.

Nobody will notice. That is how you know you are doing it right.

If faith is part of your life, you already know who the ant is trusting the summer to. If it is not, the verse still works: prepare in the season you are in, not the one you are afraid of. Either way, some cold evening down the road you will walk into the barn and feel that quiet feeling of nothing going wrong. We are trying to learn it right alongside you.

Whether you keep a pew or a porch, thanks for sitting a while this morning. Same time next Sunday.

— The Sackett Ranch Family