Vol.14, No.82, December 2011/January 2012
An Apple Going Over Niagara Falls
by Mila Purcell

This is a painting I did when I was five. Interesting choice of colours. You can clearly see the apple, rushing to its impending demise. There is a defining, pervasive sense of motion in the piece... suspended motion. I really nailed it, in my opinion. For a child, I had a strong sense of foreboding. Kind of eerie, actually, now that I think about it (which is something I hadn’t done in ages, until I found it in a stack of papers, coffee-ringed and largely ignored). But I’m beginning to feel the significance of it now. Powerfully. As if I’ve just realized that I’m holding the Rosetta stone to my life, masterfully executed by me at the ripe and sage fifth year of it. Weird. I don’t actually remember painting it. I do, however, remember having the idea to paint it... stranger still.
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Vol.14, No.82, December 2011/January 2012
Haying Time
by Robert J. Patmore

We lived on a small farm in the North S a s k a t c h e w a n Parklands area. The country was a little rolling, with a few valleys. Most of us farmed the valleys, and ran a few cattle on the marginal part of the farm, down near the slough. Up on the hilly part, to the east, a lot of “prairie hay” grew. Prairie hay is not very tall, and kind of woolly. The mower has to be in good shape to cut it, and the hay must be very dry. Damp prairie wool won’t mow! You know, I am sure, all about that! Before you mow “prairie wool” you overhaul the cutter bar on the old 5 foot horse drawn mower. You rivet new mower sections in the knife, as well as new “ledger plates”, in the “stone guards”. Oil all the right places! Now, you are ready. Hitch up old Sparky and Babe, take along a gallon jug of cool water, and begin. When you arrive at the edge of the odd shaped hay patch, you lower the cutter bar from its transport position. Now, the mower has a big lever, so you can raise the cutter bar, to avoid any stones or “mole hills”. Gotta take care of your new knife! If you see a quite thick patch of grass ahead, you “encourage” the horses to hurry a bit, so the mower will cut this thick patch. Now when you are mowing, you can’t go around all the sticks and little shrubs. If they’re not too big, they’ll do for hay too! You’d be surprised what the cows will eat in the middle of the winter! After the mowing, the hay has to cure a couple of days or so, to be sure it’s dry enough. Then, along you come with the big hay rake. That’s fun! And the team seems to enjoy it too. You rake back and forth, so as to make long windrows. When you think you have enough hay in the rake, you just step on that tidy little lever there by your right foot. Up comes the rake tines. And your long row of hay looks so nice! But don’t get too much hay in each rake full, because if it should rain the hay won’t dry. Now, when you get the whole odd shaped hayfield into long rows, the next step, in a day or so, is to rake the rows up into ‘hay coils’, to be forked onto the hayrack. It’s surely not going to rain, now you’ve got this far, is it ? So make good big hay coils, as you gather up the long rows.
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