Four in the Morning
It was four in the morning when I started.
The stars were still out over the east ridge, hard and white, the way they get in Tennessee in June before the humidity rolls in. The field was black and silver. Every blade of grass held a drop of dew, and when I stepped off the gravel and into the hay, it soaked my jeans to the thigh before I’d taken ten steps.
June timothy. Gold at the tips. Up to my knee.
I could smell it. Sweet and green and a little like summer rain on hot pavement. That smell has been in my lungs since I was four years old.
I had the mower deck set low on the little Ford and crawling.
First gear. Barely above idle. The headlights threw two pale beams across the hay, and the sound of the engine was the only noise for a mile in any direction except the frogs down at the pond.
Behind me, the white arbor waited in the dark.
Two hundred folding chairs sat in wet rows on the mowed grass in front of it. Wooden chairs, white, rented. I’d helped set them up the night before, every one of them, while my sister stood on the porch with a clipboard and told me where they went.
Two big white tents stood at the edge of the field. Forty by sixty. Sides rolled up. Strings of lights waiting in the dark for somebody to plug them in.
By two o’clock that afternoon, my sister would marry Scott Hendricks right there. Under that arbor. With this field behind her.
My name is Laney Tidwell. I’m thirty-four years old.
I own eighty acres of hay ground outside Shelbyville, Tennessee. Timothy and orchardgrass on the bottom forty, fescue and clover on the hill. Two cuttings a year if the rain cooperates, three if God’s in a good mood.
I sell square bales to horse people from Nashville and round bales to the cattle men in Bedford County. I teach agriculture at Cascade High School to pay the bills that the hay won’t.
I inherited the land fourteen months ago.
From my grandfather.
