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Friday Night in Early September at Morris and Sara Wayman’s Farm, Roseneath, Ontario At dusk, the grey wooden barn drops anchor near the house like a huge ship riding at the top of the fields. On the barn roof, against the lighter part of the sky pigeons flutter and call. Silence everywhere else except for a car speeding by on the road. It’s an old barn: inside in the day the wide beams show adze marks from when they were squared by hand. Age is what this ship carries besides the hay hoisted in each year to the upper decks and the cattle loaded aboard below late in the fall. And she has held other cargo: two years ago her bins were full of oats; the farmer who rents the land trucked his crop to Peterborough to find the cereal manufacturers there wouldn’t pay enough to meet his costs. So he drove back in a rage and dumped the oats here. It was always a difficult farm: each inch of it cut out of the forest; stones down in the fields had to be levered out each spring before plowing. Now only beef is grown: the farmer runs his herd on four such farms owned by city people. This property was bought when an old woman died. She had lived in fewer and fewer rooms, sealing off the upstairs, then parts of the main floor, until her life was the bedroom and an adjoining kitchen. The present owners use the place summers and weekends. The Poetry of Tom Wayman / 21 This evening, in the dim vegetable garden the corn is finished, the tomatoes and carrots are ready for picking. Just before dark the fields look exhausted, cropped close by the cattle in their daily tidal drift over the land. The animals are out of sight now, on the slope of the furthest hill. At dawn they will be up around the barn again as it floats into the morning with the first of the chill air it will haul all winter already stored in its holds. 22 / The Order in Which We Do Things ...

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