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Hay DayNovember 17, 2007 The loft at Malabar Farm is now packed with hay. Our various trunks, extra buckets, and assorted other containers and equipment are now jammed up against the south wall. The south-facing window is the barn cats' favored winter sleeping place -- they've got two cat beds on a seldom-opened trunk that receive enough winter sun to stay cozy even when the outside temp is well below freezing. One of the beds was store-bought; the other is a flat-bottomed feed tub with two threadbare saddle blankets in it. Each one can hold two cats comfortably. In serious cold all three pile into one bed and you have to count ears to figure out how many cats are in here. Cats don't like an empty loft: there are no hay tunnels to play, hide, or snooze in. This morning the loft was empty. Now it's got just over 400 bales of mostly timothy hay in it -- something over nine tons. Steve (who can wrangle a semi in tight quarters like no one I've ever seen) delivered it from near Saratoga, New York, accompanied by his eight-year-old daughter, Cassidy, and their dog, Elly Mae, an Australian blue-heeler. Steve unloaded onto the conveyor; Keith, Patrick, a colleague of Keith's whose name I didn't get, Ginny, and I stacked in the loft; Ana (who sprained her ankle this past week at basketball practice) counted bales, Cassidy assisting. At the beginning Ginny performed some tricky moves with the tractor, lifting Steve up in the frontloader so he could pull the conveyor out from its place -- wedged between the top row of hay and the trailer ceiling -- and lower it to the ground. Within an hour we were celebrating a good job done; beer for some, soda for others. Only one bale broke. Pernod and Allie got the loose stuff for dinner.
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