Once it occupied the farmland nearby. As a child I remember watching it being pulled slowly across a mown hayfield, its tines gathering up hay. At the precise time dad would pull a handle and the tines would rise and release the hay in a windrow and then bounce down accompanied by a metallic ping, ting-ting that I can still hear in my mind’s ear.
Now, aged into obsolescence, it resides down by the river to be slowly enshrined by nature. I had to seek it out, and though it had been years since I had last seen its final resting place, it was easily found. Now it is embraced by brush and branches, silent save for its distant echos in my memory.
For a photo of the same rake 12 years earlier and a poem I wrote for Nebraska Life magazine see: https://eskildoodle.com/the-hay-rake/
#hayrake #windrows #farm #hay #memory #echos
Eskildoodle Photos and Feelings 