We Don't Do Boys

We don't usually do boys, but we can use a little spare muscle when it's time to put up the horse hay. Fortunately, there were some extra boys to be had this week, so we picked up a couple, along with their thirteen-year-old cousin Laura.

The job: pick up seventy-five bales of grass hay, weighing fifty to sixty-five pounds each. Throw them on a hay rack, stack them four or five high, ride the rack to the barn and undo everything you just did. Repeat the whole process a second time.

It is an onerous task on days like this, when the sun is in overdrive and the cloudless Midwest heats up to 96 degrees.

We've done this before, sans boys, but the extra muscle means the work goes faster, the shoulders don't ache quite so much, the sunburn's not so red, and the chatter is lively. Maybe because it's boy-chatter, which we're pretty short on around here.


For example, "I wonder what it would feel like to have one million eggs thrown at you all at once." Or, "What sort of a bug do you suppose made that big splat on your windshield? Do you think it was a horsefly? Which horse's blood do you think is making that splat so red?"



Somehow, these sorts of things don't tend to come up much in our family.


There is reward in this work: riding the rack to the barn, the feel of muscles you'd forgotten you had, ice-cold lemonade when the last bale is set down, the satisfaction of working together, and of a hard job well done.


I'm thankful for strong girls and strong boys to borrow.