Something About a Field

What music to my ears it was last week, on a hot and humid day, to hear the whirring of the bush hog in our new back pasture.  A transformation was going on, and while it may not have been exactly righteous, it was at least very good.

Our wish to do some tending of the field had been stymied by two key factors since moving in: first, not having the right equipment and second, the constant soggy state of the ground during this unusually rainy June.  This patch of land, lovely to look at from afar but up close rich with all kinds of weeds and poison ivy, was crying out to be shorn.  Finally, mowing would bring some relief.   As I watched the guy (a hired man summoned for this first significant cutting) go round and round, I got to thinking about why it was such balm to the soul – my soul, anyway—to see a tractor at work, and to be able to see it in each part of the field, with the guy holding the seat and glancing back over his shoulder from time to time to check his progress.

One some level I realized that this was kind of silly.  After all, we’re not – yet, anyway—getting in hay for animals who depend upon it; the mowing is really just so the field will look a whole lot better and so we can begin to get a sense of what’s in it to plan for the future.  I’m a pastor’s  –OK, now bishop’s — wife, and my husband is indeed a kind of shepherd — to a flock located not in our back yard but all around the state.  I’m happy to say that he also happens to be an enthusiastic mower and general yard-tender, eager to get his own John Deere (recently in need of repairs) roaring around the place.  And you should have seen him relishing his new mighty weed-whacker on a recent Sunday off!  Still and all, I recognize that our economic well-being does not depend on the particular output of that back field, and yet the act of mowing itself almost seems — dare I say it — sacred to me.

To get to the reason for this, I have to go back to my childhood, when we did get in the hay.  My father wore a suit when he commuted to New York City, but at home he was pretty much all farmer.  We always had a couple of horses, springing from his own early love of the animals, and for them we cut hay in a couple of different fields.  I say “we” but the truth was I was always on the tail end of the operation; as the youngest as well as the only girl, I was generally the chief stomper-on-the-load once it had been lifted up by pitchforks held by my shirtless brothers, into the wagon.

We didn’t have a baler, so the hay stayed loose in the barn.  Here’s what I remember most about those times:  my gentle father driving the tractor, always in his cap and often sneezing from the pollen; Irish Setters running around, but only after it was safe to come out when the sickle bar was done cutting; brothers kidding each other and laughing; the scratchy feel of the hay on my legs and hayseeds covering all of us; the rich tapestry of it all.

It’s no wonder, really, that I still like to see a tractor going round and round in a field.  Just the sight of it brings a lot of good stuff back to me.  I think it’s one part real memory, one part metaphor.

Back in Robert Frost’s day, cutting a field was a more solitary and quieter activity.  He depicts just himself and his scythe in his evocative poem, “Mowing”:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak /To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows…

Sounds like something close to a sacred activity, doesn’t it?   A still-living poet and my neighbor in New Hampshire, Maxine Kumin, published a whole collection with the title Still to Mow, based on some lines of John Gardner.  Like Frost, she too has known the kinship of farmer to field.

And, for a perhaps slightly less sacred look at fields, we can dip into pop music for a moment.

Ever since our 14 year old brought us into the world of Country, my radio dial seems to go there even when he’s not in the car.  Recently a song by Kip Moore has been rolling around in my brain a lot.  Maybe you’ve heard it.  The first line goes, “Something about a truck in a farmer’s field.”  Then it tells a kind of a story  — basically a guy’s idea of a perfect pastoral evening with a pretty girl –by adding one element at a time and repeating the ones we already had, much like many children’s songs do.  There’s the YouTube version with the willing girl in the red dress and cowboy boots, and then there’s this one with just three guys playing guitars. Here it is for your listening pleasure:

What I like most about the song is the repeating “something about” phrase: the difference in me is I feel he could just stop with the plain old field alone – no truck or beer or any love interest needed.  But then I guess he wouldn’t have had much of a hit, would he?