It's a cold and rainy day here in central PA and I just got back from the barn where I fed the horses. My wife works for a local dentist several nights a week and when she does, I get to do her chores, too. [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img] My first chore, upon arriving home from work, was to clean out the gutters.

So, I was partially soaked before my trek to the barn. Puddles, mud and hungry horses greeted me as I arrived. My wife had let them in their stalls all day due to the weather, so they began to pace in anticipation of being fed. Our QH watches me, the TB sticks her nose in her feeding tray and the Appaloosa paws at the ground underneath his. "Hold on, hold on," I say to myself, "I can't feed you all simultaneously."

As I climbed the ladder into the hay loft (we get to the hay loft via a set of drop down steps concealed in the ceiling of our tack room) and smelled the hay it brought back memories of a much warmer day when the hay was stacked.

As I cut into a new bale with a paring knife (hay lofts are the Bermuda Triangle for our paring knives), I thought about the baling process that wrapped these bales and flung them into the hay wagon.

As I dropped the hay into the hay racks (our hay loft is above the center aisle, which is flanked by the stalls, so we can drop the hay into the racks from above), I thought about all the work that I did, and the farmer did, to get this piece of summer into our barn.

I stood there for a minute, leaning against the mountain of hay bales I had stacked. I listened to the rain patter on the roof above my head which was answered by the contented munching of our equine diners beneath my feet. On a cold and rainy night, it's a warming thought to be reminded by the sweet smell of hay of both the summer that was, and the summer that will be.