Mosaic Monday - The Hay Bales of Rockbridge County

It is time for another Mosaic Monday.  If you have not already visited Mary Carroll’s blog , The Little Red House, be sure to pay her a visit and go through the listing of all the beautiful mosaics that have been posted this week. You have a real treat in store.

Just click on the mosaic or the photos below to enlarge.

Even after 32 years living on a small farm in rural Virginia, I still get excited each time I see the farmers cutting their hay and baling it.  How they do in the heat of the day with the sun beating down on them I do not know. I would be itching to death riding on that tractor with all of that cut stuff blowing in my face.  Here in this part of Virginia the bales are not square, but rather they are rolled and then placed side by side to wait for the cattle to need them.  Sometimes they are covered with black plastic, and this year I saw one batch covered in heavy white plastic. Whenever I am driving from the house into town or to school and back, I’m always stopping trying to capture the bales with the mountains in the background.  It is the most beautiful sight to me and one I’d never seen until I moved here  years ago.  There was no hay or any hay bales in South Florida where I grew up a block from the Atlantic Ocean....lots of sand, humidity, and hot weather without air conditioning, but no hay!  Now you understand why I am so enamored with this special sight I get to enjoy while driving the roads of Rockbridge County.

These are shots of a friend of ours who was baling right down the road from the house.  I just love his blue tractor and couldn’t resist including him.

“Ah, that I were free again. Free as when I rode that day, Where the barefoot maiden raked the hay.”
~John Greenleaf Whittier