Try to teach your children to be ambidextrous, so that if the child happens to have her right hand smashed in a door she will not be as helpless as I happen to be right now. If you wonder how I'm writing this column under these circumstances, it's all being done over the phone by that kind-hearted Marilyn Doherty. This broken hand just gives me one more chance to be grateful I have such wonderful neighbors.
This is the time of year I always feel I have cheated my children by not living in the country where they could enjoy the treat of a real hayride, as I did when I was a child.
I'm speaking here not of the kind of hayride where you see baled hay in a pickup truck, but a real hayride where the farmer cuts the grass, rakes it up, uses a fork to build a great heap of hay on the wagon, and holds it all down by the help of a whole group of neighborhood children. We used to do that every August up in Towaco, N.J., population 500. We called it helping Mr. Galla get in the hay, and felt like we were doing real work. Mr. Galla spelled his name with an 'a' at the end because he was not Italian, he was Romansch. He owned a horse called Jerry who wore a felt hat like that worn by one of the Marx brothers and a cow called Bessie the Bull. My little sister and I never could see why other people thought that was a funny name.
One day in August when it was terribly hot, one of the other children would come to our house and say "Mr. Galla's getting in the hay!" and we would rush out, followed by adjurations from my mother not to let Barbara get sunburned. Sunblock had not been invented yet, so Barbara, my little sIster, who was a freckled redhead, always got terribly sunburned and I got scolded for it. We would climb onto the cart and sit on top of every forkful that Mr. Galla and his assistants tossed up. We were sure Mr. Galla would not be able to get the hay in if we had not done our part. I don't suppose many people in the U.S. get a chance to ride on that kind of a hay cart, though Europeans assure me there are still some places where it it still done.
— Lois Kelso Hunt