summer holiday & haying

Has a carnival landed in the field south of my kitchen? No, it's the hay wagon. Well, I don't know if it's called that - which sounds sort of Oklahoma-ish (the musical) - maybe it's just called The Truck that Hay Bales are Loaded Onto. Because that's what it is. My neighbor spent the last several days haying the huge field. Last evening and this morning he hurled and stacked hay bales onto the truck for hours. There are still lots more (17 acres worth). It doesn't matter that a holiday weekend is coming up. When it's ready it's ready and he will work until it's done.

And what do I know about haying? The girl who grew up in the Bronx? Who spent most of her adult life in New York and Connecticut? My childhood experiences of Fourth of July weekends involved firecrackers and Roman candles, lots of food and relatives. The aunts, uncles, cousins who lived in The City drove up to our northeast Bronx "country" house to spend the day eating and visiting. My mother spent days cleaning, cooking, baking. My father mowed the lawn, prepared the brick barbeque grill, machete-ed weeds just beyond the white picket fence (yes, that's what I said) where there was an large empty lot surrounded by trees that we were permitted to use as if it were our own. When he briefly kept a vegetable garden he picked whatever was available - like the small bounty we received from friends today and which we ate for supper.
  

At nightfall in the Bronx, after eating and talking all day (the adults) a bonfire was built and we sat around it toasting marshmallows. The uncles told tall stories, the kids set off firecrackers with lighted "punks" - after we had formed a brigade that solemnly marched to the flagpole and took down the flag. One summer the metal pole was struck by lightening and the flag burned to a crisp - that was the last of that ritual - the flag was never replaced. By dusk the coffee pots were percolating on the kitchen stove, the smell of espresso wafting out the open screened doors, homemade desserts carried outside by a parade of sturdy aunts. The kids waited for the Bungalow Bar man who would come ringing down the block in his truck. That reliable 1950s summer presence - the white  ice cream truck - was supposed to resemble the Hindi thatched house that the word bungalow denoted. I can still swoon over a toasted coconut vanilla ice cream bar. But I do wonder who thought up that bungalow thing.
     Our preparation for the Fourth this year is, basically, nothing. Maybe we'll go to a friend's house to watch the town fireworks (they have an unobstructed view from their road) or maybe we'll just pour a couple of glasses of wine and watch an old movie.

"There's just no accounting for happiness"
Jane Kenyon wrote.
Like when I tried out my new digital camera
One fourth of July and set it to "fireworks"
Colorful stars and swirls and cascades
But then I said so what?
And deleted all fifty pictures.
They were not the happiness I desired.