They were my father’s last draft team
Mares black and bay
Grade Belgians 15.5 hands
Maud Lead Bird Off
I remember sitting on his lap
As he sat on the steel bucket seat
Of the mowing machine
Their lines in my small hands
My hands held in his
As we mowed the alfalfa
On our farm near Riner
Where Route 8 and the Childress road meet
It was 1944
I was six years old
Born in June 1938
I can still smell the blooms of alfalfa
Hear the chatter of the 4’ cutter bar
As the cutter blades slide back and forth
through the guards
Pulled by the Pittman
Attached to the flywheel
Smell the sweet sweat from Maud and Bird
See the lather blooms neath their harness
As they steadily walk the rectangle
Stopping at each corner to “whoa”
Pivoting right ninety degrees and repeating
Watching the cut stems fall back on bare ground
Til the last blade of alfalfa lies flat on the land
To be cured by the sun and raked into windrows tomorrow
Next day at noon we are back
This day riding in Pop’s lap
On the bucket seat of the side delivery rake
As it rolls up the Alfalfa stems into windrows
behind Maud and Bird
The third day we are back
But Maud and Bird are on pasture
This day we ride the Doodle Bug
A Model A modified with buck rake behind
Pops backs the Doodle Bug
Down the windrows
Then lifts the tines with cables
Attached to a PTO of the Model A
He drives to a haystack
Adds the loose alfalfa to it
Drives the Doodle Bug back
To the windrows for more
Soon the alfalfa field is bare
The haystack a large rectangle
To be fed to the cattle and sheep
Starting in November
Soon WWII is over
Draft horses replaced by John Deere tractors
The putt putts of As and Bs
Ring through the air cross the county
On my twelfth birthday
June 29, 1950 Pops buys an MT
Mine to drive for a decade
Until after my second year of law school
Then my mother rents the farm
To a neighbor
She and Mary Ann lived on there through the century
Pops had died in 1954
The farm shaped me
I still love it
Smell the sweat of Maud and Bird
And the blooms on the alfalfa