In my last column, I left swaths of dewy, scythe-mown grass lying on the ground. So as it dries, let’s pause for a moment on those “swaths.” In North America, this word is pronounced with the “a” of “squat,” while most of the U.K. would use the “a” of “bathe.” The Brits got mixed up, I’m afraid, even though they spell it “swathe,” confusing it with another word, “swade,” that is related to the famous “swaddling clothes” of the baby Jesus. But in any case, these days “swath” has given way to “windrow,” a word that conjures up the image of the warm wind that dries the hay.
After mowing, you will need to “ted” the hay. When the grass is thick, the top layer dries in the sun, but underneath it will still be wet. You have to shake and spread the hay out with a pitchfork so the sun can do its job. This is “tedding,” a word that apparently was used only in the Northeast and North Central U.S. In the mid-1800s, the first horse-drawn tedders were invented, and this noun produced the rival verb “to tedder the hay” in New England, reminding me of my daughter, who used to say “I can’t ‘zipper up’ my coat.” Nowadays, some farms have long-tined tedders that fluff up the hay, but we had a “crusher,” a machine with two steel rollers that would squeeze out the moisture to speed up the drying process.
Tedding or crushing makes it dry faster, but you still have to turn the whole windrow over so the underside gets its time in the sun. This is where the rake comes in. It’s tedious work by hand, but necessary to get the moisture out of the entire windrow, because it was drummed into our heads from birth: no wet hay in the barn. When you bale it, you’re pressing it tightly together, and if it’s wet, it will eventually get moldy — or worse, get hot enough to combust spontaneously, burning down your barn and your livelihood.
Once it’s thoroughly dry, the farmer would take a pitchfork and cock it up. Haycocks are small stacks in the field, carefully layered so rainwater will run off, like thatch. Later, the cocks would be gathered up and unloaded into a large haystack near the barn, or preferably into the hayloft or haymow. Technically, the difference between a hayloft and a haymow (rhymes with “cow”) is that the loft is up over the stalls and the mow is on ground level, but most people use them interchangeably. It’s interesting that you begin the whole hay process by “mowing” (rhyming with “snowing”) and end it with “mowing” (rhyming with “plowing”). We owe this paradox to the Anglo-Saxons, who brought the German word “to mow” (cut) to Britain in the fifth century, and the Vikings, who brought the Norse “muga” (a pile) 300 years later to northern England, where, after losing the “g,” it still shows up as “mow” — though “hayloft” is the more usual term in the U.K.
The U.K. also had “hayricks,” a word that survived the ocean crossing and found a home for a while in New England and the Midlands. Haystacks are round, but ricks were usually long and rectangular, with a thatched roof. There were also “hay barracks” in New England, a word imported from the Dutch of the Mid-Atlantic region. This was a thatched structure supported by poles where loose hay could be stored, a kind of makeshift hay barn that could be set up anywhere. Both ricks and barracks became obsolete once baling began.
When I first remember, our wagon full of hay bales was driven to the end of the barn, where my father would use the “horsefork” to load them in — the name remained unchanged long after the horses had been replaced by a tractor. Four long, curved blades hung from a pulley into the wagon. Dad would gather the bales, insert the blades perfectly, and eight bales at a time would rise slowly, pulled by the tractor my mother drove, then move on a track into the barn. In later years, we got a hay elevator, and Dad took the hardest job of all — up in the hayloft, shirt soaked with sweat, mowing bales away as the air filled with dust and the temperature rose in direct proportion to the diminishing space.
Dad thought it was strange for me to go through all the effort of making hay with a scythe and pitchfork, but the hay was excellent. The irony was that I had no animals to feed, so even though I had some good-sized stacks of well-cured hay in the barn, it was loose and hard to find a home for. The first year, I sold it to someone with horses, for about the equivalent of a nickel for every hour I put into making it. After that, I gave it away to people with goats. I believe my father, who lived to be 99, thought I had finally come to my senses when I hung up my scythe and bought a lawn tractor.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.