SUMMER

That's how the world is built: if you plow, then you must sow, and since it is planted, then it will come up. But if it comes up, it will grow and give fruits, and, like it or not, you will do what Providence intended. But why do you like it or not? Even the lazy one knows pleasure in plowing and sowing. So, seeing how force and life appear out of nothing is good.
 The great mystery of birth and decay annually accompanies the peasant from spring to fall. The burden of work, if you are strong and not ill, is also pleasant. You don't notice the strain. Labour itself does not exist apart. It is not noticeable in everyday life. Life is one with work. Labour and leisure, weekdays and holidays, cannot live without each other. They are so natural in their sequence that the burden of peasant labour is concealed.
 Moreover, people knew how to take care of themselves. People treat lazy people with irony and sometimes sympathy, morphing into pity. But those who did not spare work themselves and their loved ones, too, were ridiculed and considered to be wretched. God forbid straining yourself in the woods or during plowing! You are going to suffer, and the family will be broken. (Interestingly, the disabled man, all his life afterward, blamed himself, saying that he made a mistake and messed up things.) If the child strains himself, he will stunt his growth. A woman pulls herself; she likely will not have children. So, the physical strain was feared like fire.
Children were especially watched over, and the elderly were experienced. The burden of work built up gradually over the years. Adolescents who were too eager and bragged in front of their peers were cooled off and kept in check. Lazy ones were encouraged in many ways. The perceived need quickly became pleasant, natural, and transparent. The drudgery of labour was brightened by the diversity and rapid change of house and field tasks. Whatever but monotony in this labour was not present.
The feet are tired; tomorrow, they rest; the hands get tired. Despite the tradition and the apparent uniformity, everything was different. Plowmen stopped work to feed the horses, and mowers interrupted to break twigs for brooms or gather tree bark.
Summer is the year's peak; it's the time of excellent labour effort. "When the fall will come, it will make you responsible for everything," they say in the summer.
In June, white northern nights double daylight, greenery multiplies in the field and garden. If thousands of peasant tasks change in size and essence, every part of the body gets tired in most tasks: hands, feet, and every vein. (Of course, this primarily works with wood, plowing and mowing.) During these activities, rest should be taken seriously. Is working two or three hours before breakfast different from current fitness?
Breakfast is usually solid, with cabbage soup. The regime has to be strictly adhered to. It quickly becomes a habit. During the summer, lunch is eaten after teatime. "Have another cup, so you will eat more!" - the hostess persuades a woman who manages the entire house. After lunch, there is always rest for about two hours. Before dinner again, there is a significant work effort. As a result, the day turns out very productive. (Even when working as "boat-haulers," that is, during seasonal work with the contractor, a very rare boss forced people to work after dinner.)
Stub upland ("to hide") was the most demanding work in the woods; only the strongest men were involved. Ancient pre-Christian way of slash agriculture responds to our days only a distant echo: "to hide," hence stump up the burnt taiga, prepare land for sowing flax or barley. Initially, a large forest area was burned after cutting down timber. In the second year, they began to stump up. Massive charred logs and burnt stumps were uprooted. To get out of the earth, such as a tree stump, you must cut the roots, undermine it from all sides, and shake it with the lever. You can imagine how a man who spent a day or two in the burnt taiga looked! There were only white eyes and teeth. Stubbing up the land long since disappeared, leaving a legacy of the word "cinders." On burned areas in our region, many berries, mostly currants and raspberries, still grow. During the summer, everything in nature is rapidly changing. Hardly had time to sow, and barely any shoots showed up, but weeds are already here. So, it is necessary to weed out. At this point, grandmothers give kids baskets, and grandmothers get on the strip. Good, if the land had not yet hardened, milkweed, horsetail and other parasites are pulled out with the roots.
At the same time, one must quickly rebuild the fence around the garden beds and make a timber fence, forming a run and two or three forest pastures. The cattle grazed in the summer on the natural forest pastures. It was driven to the fields only in late autumn. Walking to the forest pasture was a favourite activity of many, especially young people. Imagine the first fresh summer when there is the smell of young leaves and pine needles when morels grow and the lilies of the valley blossom. A large crowd of young, the elderly, adolescents, women, and sometimes serious men go around a merry hill in the woods. All with hatchets, all brought food. They chop aspens, long thin birches, and dry fir trees and lay along the pasture's perimeter. Then they put down crosswise the spruce stakes and piled on them the new poles, which still have branches on them. This way, it will be a very sturdy barbed fence. A good fence is for the shepherd and half the battle.
Do not be lazy. Drum the drums and close the gates made of poles. Such a day creates a celebratory mood. At long rest breaks, you hear so much funny and scary, and so much happens until the evening, so going to the forest pasture will be remembered for a lifetime. Henceforth, the youth is looking forward to this day; although this exact day will never come again... the same festivity comes from silo work, which had not previously existed. This work has appeared in the village only with the collective farms. Communal nature makes it very similar to walking to the forest pasture. The main female forces mow young, juicy grass and deposit it in the stacks. (It is important not to let the grass fade or dry out.) Teens transport it in the carts to the grass silage pits and quickly push it down. When the pit is half full, it is pushed by a kind-hearted mare with an almost human-speaking voice.
 So, a proud six-year-old silo-rammer rides on her all day in the pit. Half the working day is entered in his name for this deed to his father's playbook. Horse manure is thrown out with the pitchforks; the mare is given water by sending down a bucket of water on the rope. When the pit fills and rammed, the grass smells delicious acidity, inside already begun fermentation. The hole is covered with soil and closed with clay - it will be kept until winter. If the weather is hot, there are gadflies. Then you have to carry the grass at night because, with any, even the most good-natured mare cannot deal because of gadflies. The night workers are bugged by midges - the smallest flies at night. They get in everywhere. (Mice, also called gnats, if they are many.) Manure was transported in the North at night because of the many gadflies. Manure was thrown on the cart with a pitchfork. The seams are torn off with incredible difficulty. The driver carries a cart in the field to the strips and, at regular intervals, pulls down a piece with a crooked pitchfork. That manure is spread out on the strips in the morning, and it is time to plow. After the plow goes either an old man or boy, he pushes manure into the furrow to bury it underground with the whip. Often, mowing is still ongoing, but the harvest time has already arrived, and it is about the same time to sow the winter wheat and pull flax. The weather never allows for relaxing or getting bored.
When beautiful, fragrant hay is on the pitchfork, but in the distance rumbles the distant thunderstorm, the hands themselves go faster, and the rakes only glimpse in motion. And if the storm is about to become on the field, it begins to run even very clumsily. But the main thing, of course, is that the stacks of hay were made ahead of neighbours, grain was put under the roof and threshed before anybody, and the flax was not pulled among the village's last.
The age-old desire of the Russian peasant not to be the last, not to become a byword, was smartly used in the first years of the collective farms. The Stakhanovism movement was based precisely on this quality of character. A parable of a man who was dying gave his young son a warning: "Eat your bread with honey; do not say hello first." Only hardworking sons learned the real taste of bread (like honey), and one who works in the field, such as a mower, only answered with a nod to the greetings of passersby. It turns out those fans of sleep are always greeted first...
Harvest time is not less exciting than haymaking time. Bread, which is the crown of all aspirations, has already been felt real and weighty, not only in thoughts. Even a small handful of cut stalks of Rye with a sickle is a good piece of a bread loaf, and how many such parts are in the sheaf?
"Zazhinok," one of the significant number of labour rituals, was particularly pleasing, joyful and holy. The best female reaper in the family took a sickle and cut the first handful. High as a man, a thick sheaf personified abundance. The winter grain in the North was mowed with the scythe little and rarely. Cut with a sickle, Rye was not lost in the field, even a single spike, so nothing was left for mice or birds. Nine sheaves were set up leaning towards each other, forming a hut called the "suslon." On the top, like a hat, put on the tenth sheaf. Children have always wanted to get under this warm straw-grain shelter. Every good suslon fed the average family for three to four weeks; it produced around 33 pounds and even more grain. As they say, Rye ripened a few days in suslones while sitting down, then transported to the threshing floors.
Not everybody could adequately put the sheaves on the carriage. A man must know how to "stand on the cart" (because the dry sheaves slide, crawl, and one or two are out, and then the whole bound thing falls down). Initially, filled the inside of the wagon with shafts along the brim, then put them in rows across, inside the ears. Some on the left, some on the right, in the middle, put along a few pieces to not sink. Up to the top rows were slightly narrowed, but the very top, very narrow, placed them back and forth. The cart was tied afterward with the fastener - spruce pole. Even more difficult was to lay down on the pudgy cart barley or oat sheaves. Oats and barley in the North, too, were mowed with the sickle; the sheaves were placed in piles, in pairs.
 Peas can only be mowed with the scythe because they "run," clinging from the stem to the stem. So large pieces of sheaves (or ("whales") were taken to the threshing floor, and wooden tri-corn pitchforks were raised to the hitch, that is, under the roof of the barn. Because the horse at the barn entrance turns somewhere to the side to ease the burden, it would have to be able to enter without touching a gate-riser, not breaking the wheel or the cart's axis.
Everything had to be mastered! Sheaves were put accurately in the threshing floor holders and kept there until threshing. If there were no rye seeds from the previous year for planting winter crops, fresh seeds were threshed immediately and produced new grain. (Sowing had to be done necessarily in August, during the three-day summer of winged ants.) With bread on the threshing floor, you can count that the crop has been harvested and saved under a roof. This is a great joy and happiness for the whole family. The main thing is to grow and get into the threshing floor, but to thresh, anyone can do...
Summer is also a carpenter's time: building a house in the rain or out in the cold is unpleasant. Unfinished log cabins sometimes stood as a reproach or a reminder for several years. A trying time is a summer, what to say, but there were many holidays. Time is to work, brew beer, and pay visits. Who has not had time was an object of jokes.