CRUSHING OF FLAX

    Dry, easily broken plants are asking to go into a crushing machine. Break two or three times a handful, and it falls down with rigid bang chaff exposing the gray, gentle, but firm fibers. By the way, softness and strength are combined in the strands of flax fibre.
    There is no less work in autumn in the fields and at home than at the height of summer. Women and girls reluctantly forget for a while about the flax. But with the first snow, with the first frost, when men begin to decimate the cattle and go into the woods, when all that has grown in beds, in the field and in the woods has been cleaned, collected, preserved, at such a time starts an ache in the heart: flax folded in the threshing floor, or somewhere in the changing room, haunts the woman's heart. Merry panic can arise at any moment.
    Mary looks out of the window, and it appears to her that a neighbour Masha about to go to crush flax. Although Masha has not thought about the flax and only dragged a bucket of feed into the pen… But Mary, not to be left out, grabs dry flax from the shelf and runs to the crushing machine somewhere in the barn or the bathhouse.
    After seeing such a thing, Masha drops everything and runs to start crumple flax. There will be overnight, and the entire village begins to crumple flax. Now and the laziest, most awkward cannot resist: I am worse than the others?
    Every competition is always quite personal, that is clear. (A contest between the collectives that include many thousands, located God knows where, as enshrined in the printed commitments, willy-nilly becomes somewhat abstract.)
    Under the threshing machine quickly grow heaps of the flax bark, which, while not rotted in the rain, is used as the litter for cattle. The left hand uses the wooden jaw of threshing; the right-hand shoves down a handful of flax, representing one-eighth of a sheaf of flax. A handful is precisely what can grab the palm of a woman. A handful of flax when pulling it out of the ground is smaller and depends on the stiffness of the soil, planting density, and the size of a hand.
    Since the threshing process, flax no longer counts in shafts but the handfuls. Fifty handfuls are called "nickel." Threshed and combed flax was measured in "nickels"…
    Two "nickels» or a hundred handfuls constitute one "Kirby." During the day, a strong woman would do an average of three "Kirby's." The flax fibers are piled to dry on the stove, sometimes on the benches. All previous course of treatment of flax was individual, sometimes done by the family: either mother-in-law with daughter-in-law, mother and daughter, or daughter-in-law with sister-in-law. This, incidentally, was an excellent opportunity for women's reconciliation. Women and girls joined from different houses during the threshing, or the villages ended. They sometimes gather from the whole town to do retting if the town was relatively small.