Well Hurricane Irene may be well on its way to call on northern Maine come Sunday but there is still much work to be done before Harvest. Next week we’ll start killing seed potatoes to get them ready for ‘digging’.  Rye is harvested and under cover.  Cover crops need planting. Soil samples need collecting. Equipment needs repairing and so do some pallet boxes.
     Our younger kids have been back in school for two weeks. Peter, our main mechanic, heads back to college for classes ‘down to Bangor’ beginning Monday. He’ll be back weekends to repair what equipment we broke the previous week.  Yesterday, it was re-mounting, re-bending and re-welding the left boom from our 14-row sprayer which had met a tree beside the headlands and decided it wanted to stay and mingle.  These are the hazards of a farm surrounded by woods. But, intending to pass no judgment upon you folks who live where trees are sparse, we’ll take our trees along with the occasional attendant repairs.
  This reminds us of a story told many years ago by our old neighbor ‘Doss’ about an incident another neighbor had yet many years before. Seems this neighbor was mowing a field of hay with a team of horses.  Well a moose fly or something spooked the horses and in a flash they were off a-running’. Fortunately, at the first jolt, the neighbor had been tossed backwards off the mower seat and safe out of harm’s way, away from the sharp scissoring sickle bar mower-knife. The neighbor watched as his team galloped lickedy-split towards the woods pursued by that darned mower making its scary rhythmic clickety-clack noise at an ever increasing rate. This served to panic them even more as the horses galloped ever faster and faster to escape the menace behind them. The team was making a beeline to a couple of big trees just on the edge of the woods.
     Fortunately for 'them two hawses’ the gap between the trees was just wide enough for them to make it through.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t for the mower. The neighbor learned a couple of things about when a mower hits a big tree at thirty miles an hour.  First, the phrase ‘all stove up’ was invented for just this application and that shiny John Deere mower became a mangled parts machine in the twinkling on an eye. Second, it was probably pretty good planning that horse harnesses back then were made out of leather which did have some give before the fibers broke under massive duress and they were yanked off the horse’s backs to keep company with the mower and thrashed tree.
     Eventually, the horses did simmer down and were able to be rounded up.  And there was no more mowing done that day.  This runaway horse story has been told and re-told hundreds of times in our little farming town and has been part of the fabric of our community for almost a hundred years. Such shared memory is part of the ‘culture’ in agriculture and it is important that it survives even as the old-timers pass on one by one.
     Jim & Megan