This week we will reexamine our choices. We will cast our vote for the lesser of two evils. And the hayride will win. It’s either that or walk in sock feet covered with furry claws strapped to your arches. There are a limited number of ways to accomplish the annual full-on candy raid.
And the hayride is one of them. The rest of the year, people sing on commercials about hay fever, they take an expensive pill, and suddenly do slow-motion ballet through golden fields. They say things like, “Now, I can live my life like normal.”
OK, if normal is twirling in a white dress before a camera crew. We’ll go with it. The rest of us start a normal day pouring cereal in a bowl, and succeeding with most of it, followed by checking our phone, and then sitting in traffic. How much was that pill again? Because I may want to get some. Twirling and singing in fields of gold hasn’t been part of my normal for a long, long time. Let’s go ahead and say ever.
Hayrides really aren’t either. But they do show up once a year. And at that time, all the talk about allergies and hay fever and clogged sinuses just seems to dissipate, and everyone jumps on the wagon as if they’ve completely forgotten about any allergy issues, and breathing is suddenly optional.
I’m not sure what we’re so excited about, but we are! The tractor can sit rusting in the field 360 days out of the year. It calls out to a generation that never knew Mr. Green Jeans or Farmer Brown (Wait! Is this how we learned our colors?), “I’m over here. Come sit on me, and take an imaginary ride!”
No takers, but this week – This week, we’re all about it. Just hook that tractor to a 14 foot utility trailer and you’re rivaling Six Flags with a Seventh on the way. And then we do something that seems ridiculous if it weren’t so expected. We line the sides of it with hay bales.
The horses in the fields for miles are livid. “That’s good groceries you’ve got there! I can feed my family on that for a week, and you’re sitting on it! Come back here with that!” But trick-or-treaters are not good listeners. We climb up on the contraption as if we were filing through the doors of a Carrie Underwood concert. In a world where we’ve spoiled ourselves to sectional sofas that take up most of the state of Georgia, recliners that can read your mind if you wave a finger over the remote control, beds that adjust to your body for custom comfort, and the guy who talks incessantly on commercials about his pillow, nothing is more exciting suddenly than sitting on a square block of hay! And then bouncing down the road singing, “Over the potholes and through the bumps” in a vehicle that’s never heard of shock absorbers.
We’ve got stalks of hay sticking through our leotards into our ankles, legs, and lower posterior, and utility trailer guardrail marks on our back. This is fun!
Soon our Walmart bags and pillowcases full of hypertension in a candy wrapper begin to take up more room, and so we scrunch together. More tail feathers happen, plus the fact that Cowboy Bob’s pistol is in your thigh and Peter Pan’s pixie dust is in your Milky Way. This is fun!
Back in the day, we were doing good to veer far enough from a sheet-over-your-head ghost to even think of a flannel shirt and blue jeans scarecrow. Enter Pinterest, and people are getting creative enough with costumes to show up as Alexander Shunnarah or a bank vault (possibly the same costume); pipe clamps or the hypotenuse of a triangle, all climbing aboard the Hay 737 for take-off. This is fun!
Well, it was. Until the time my Tinkerbell, age two, got off the hayride at a candy stop and didn’t get back on. We were cruising down the road at all of three miles per hour - if the tractor had been any slower, we’d have been going backward - when someone said, “Where’s Miriam?” I jumped the railing of the trailer, and started running in the opposite direction, hay stalks sticking out of my bottom, flailing my wings - yeah, that. Don’t judge the mom who leaves her kid at a stranger’s house. It happens to the best of the garbage-bag-crow moms!
I found her hanging out on the deck with other groups of trick-or-treaters, her face covered in chocolate. She gave me that look when the parent shows up too early at the party, and the kid wants to chill with her friends a little longer. It was a small town, and the homeowners said, “Oh, we knew she was yours. She looks too much like you.”
I looked down at her with the chocolate on her chin, and the face paint smeared to no end, and said, “She does look exactly like her mom sometimes. I see what you mean. But uh, we gotta go now. Gotta catch that hayride. It’s probably like gone thirteen feet since I’ve been here.”
T-minus two to Halloween! Dust the tractor off. Get some squares of hay. Put on a garbage bag. This is fun!
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