The Joys of Silage--as promised

I love fall on the farm. I love fall anyway, but I love as the fields begin to turn brown. One thing that fall on the farm means is it is time to chop corn for silage. For all of you that don't know what silage is, it is chopped corn that sits rotting in a pile waiting to bed fed to hungry cows. Cows love silage. I know this because they sometimes break into the silage area to eat it. In this day and age, silage is blown into long white bags. I'll try to post a picture later.

Back in the day, the chopped corn was put into a very large pile between the haystacks (to keep it contained). The top of the pile was even with the top of the haystack. Before I go on, I must state that when I was little, I had a very bad case of "older-brother" worship. FarmerBoy was the older brother that I worshiped. I would do anything that he wanted me to do. We had to make up our own fun in the summers and one fateful day FarmerBoy suggested that we go jump in the silage. I agreed. Why? Because FarmerBoy suggested it and I'd never done it before.

It was glorious. We would climb up the haystack and climb over to the silage pit. We would then jump off, pretending that we were the great gymnasts of the world (at least I did). We would jump, we would flip, we would do anything that we could get our bodies to do. There was a spongy goodness about the rotting corn. It was just as I imagined the big styrofoam pits that the gymnasts use to be. And it was free! And I could walk there! Well, FarmerBoy and I finished our exploits, and returned to the house. Mum, nice person that she was told us that we stunk. I disagreed. FarmerBoy definitely stunk, but I did NOT! All the smell must be coming from him. Mum made us both bathe, so that Farmer Boy wouldn't smell anymore. I just did it because I believe in good hygiene.

This is a tradition that continued for several years. I even remember playing with the neighbors and jumping in their silage pit. Later in life, the silage jumping adventures had to be curtailed as I developed itchy rashes from the decomposing goo.