SPREADING FLAX FIBERS

   By Elias's day, nights become so long that "the horse ate his fill, and a Cossack gets enough sleep." On such nights falls on the meadows vast, clean and not yet icy dew. It just needed flax to turn into a "tresta," in agro-speak into the flax-hay.
   Lying on a reaped meadow, grey flax takes a steel gray colour. From the daily change of warmth and freshness and dryness and humidity, fibre separates from the stable, not valuable stem, which changes from flexible to fragile. Threshed bundles haphazardly are thrown on the cart, fastened with the rope and carried on a flat, green grass (the livestock do not graze in this field).
 Boys or young girls are happy to make this work; it is so good to ride in a dry, calm autumn field to the green grass passing haystacks, on which are sitting, looking for mice, motionless gray hawks.      You do not particularly follow the order; throw the sheaves into the meadow in heaps, as you like. You can horse around and play on such a pasture; no one would say anything.
   Mothers or sisters have carved out a free hour, come to the meadow, and spread a thin layer of flax rows. It will come out in long tracks, like doormats. The places covered with such runners were bordered with the same flax runners, round at the corners. It looked like a sizeable patterned tablecloth; sometimes, it was called the mirror.
    There was a saying: "Lie down, flax, and then get up and look in the mirror; if not soft yet, lie down and lie down more, only to come out white and soft." Children always somehow wanted to run on it barefoot. But this was forbidden. Finished flax was tested for the fragility of the stems and ease of separation of the boon by taking a sample from one of a handful.
    Then it was chosen a warm, windless day, and the flax fibers were raised and put in the sheaves. A green meadow was covered with disorderly groups of these cones, similar from the distance to the playing kids. Flax would dry in such a position; after that, it was bundled with straw bands into large bales and transported to the barn to completely dry.
    Some impatient women would bring flax inside and dry it on the stove or bunk; they wanted to begin the subsequent processing. Work on flax from beginning to end is not allocated for special days or weeks: time to do everything between the chores or on holidays. Ripened and dried flax - this is only the beginning. But let's go back to the roots to the heads, that is, the threshed heads of flax.