Heavenly haystacks

Once in while our neighbours Mr. and Mrs. B would invite two of their grandsons from Johannesburg to visit them.  Mr. B, a rather large, morose looking man rode a big horse, but Billy and Neil their grandchildren, would ride over to our farm on lowly donkeys.  Kleintjie (little one) and Lemonade.  Donkeys at the best of times are extremely stubborn beasts, but these two were exceedingly difficult.  Many a time I've watched as the boys approached us, pushing their donkeys from behind. 

These two young boys were a bit of light relief for us, as friends were few and far between.  They too had lots of interesting games to play from leap-frogging onto the backs of the donkeys, to tunnelling into haystacks.  We always had loads of haystacks for the Winter period when the grass had all but disappeared, and the cattle feed needed to be supplemented.

The cutting of the grass was one of those heady times of the year.  The sweet scent of the swaying, shimmering grass never ceased to cause me to catch my breath in sheer delight.  To lie on my back in the middle of a field of grass listening to the humming of the bees, and the various insect calls was heaven.  At the height of Summer when the sun beat down relentlessly, I was rewarded with not only the steamy smell of crushed grass, but also the different aromas of the crushed wild flowers.  On those occasions, while thoughtfully chewing the end of a newly plucked stalk of grass, I felt I could conquer the world.

My father always allowed us to sit on top of the hay once it had been loaded by pitch fork on to the trailer, and we would have this amazing ride bumping along the rutted roads, and hanging on for dear life to the steel frame at the front end of the trailer.

The best game of all was tunneling into the centre of a haystack.  It took all day to hollow out the inside and turn it into a sort of cave.   Once we had neatened it nicely and pulled out any stray bits of grass from the "ceiling", we would sit down with a tin a condensed milk, and using old teaspoons, contentedly work our way through the sticky, sweet mess.  After that, there didn't seem to be too much else to do, so by the light of a torch we would crawl back out into the world again, and with a great sense of achievement, make our weary way home.