Field crops and livestock were everybody's occupation according to their abilities: men and women, children and the elderly. However, all related to cutting and hauling wood and construction belong to adult men. There were cases when a woman with an axe sat in the corner, but this was considered abnormal, as reflected in the proverb: "Women's cities don't stand for a long time."
Forrest is firmly connected with peasant's inventory: agricultural and domestic. Men's hands created all dishes, all utensils, and toys. A different domain was the flax.
Of course, the farm, diverse and unified in its many layers, was a living organism, harmonious in its not-even-perfect embodiment.
The cows, for example, were kept not so much for milk as for manure to fertilize the land. Soil, in turn, gave not only bread but also fodder for the cattle. But where there is livestock, there are food and shoes, there are shoes, and you can go into the woods to cut down the house, including a barn for cows; if there is a cow, there will be milk and manure. The circle is closed. Economic life consisted of such interacting and interconnected cycles. This situation requires not empty mechanical but a thoughtful attitude to work.
The field and livestock labour cycles rested on the age-old tradition and ruthlessness of seasonal changes. But this does not mean that the peasant labour did not require a creative attitude, that the plowman and the shepherd do not need talent, and that inspiration and joy of creation are for peasants just hollow sounds.
On the contrary: only the age-old tradition helped people quickly (usually during childhood and adolescence) learn the most rational methods of hard work, freeing time and effort, clearing the way for the individual creative impulse at first and then to action. But the skill of the individual plowman or mower, even passed to his son or grandson, has not received a meaningful expression because the grain in the barn or the cattle in the barn not only did not surprise distant descendants but did not even live to see them.
No, for the soul and memory, it was needed to build a house with a pretty carving, or a church on the hill, or weave a lace, which captures the spirit and will light up the eyes of a distant great-granddaughter. Because people do not live by bread alone.
Flax was, for many centuries, a companion of a woman's fate. It was a women's pleasure and grief, beginning with infant bedding linen, a girl's shawls and ending with a shroud - a white canvas covering the person on his deathbed.
Flax is sown in warm but slightly damp soil to ripen early. So, guess when to plant!
You must be a peasant to catch this particular moment in the year. The day before or the day after would already come out wrong. After planting flax, the hands of men rarely touch it. All the long and complicated life cycle of flax is subservient only to women. They must keep pace with flax to make all it should be, regardless of other work and family concerns. Otherwise, it could become a disgrace to the entire village. Traditionally even a girl in her early years walks around the linen strips with special reverence.
In many families, girls as young as eight or ten years began to prepare a dowry and wedding gifts made or specially ordered in a chest or box. For many years, those chests were kept till the very wedding, woven canvas, stitches, and laces. Because of that, the flax strips excite the soul of a maiden:
"Please grow well, grow well, you, my flax, and grow well, my little white,
do not get crushed, my darling."
This old choral-game song described all ways of flax, from the tiny dark seed to a snow-white lace.
But how long and complex it was that way! And how it was similar to a man's life, what a powerful pagan symbolism of sounds in each step of the closed cycle of flax!
Rhythmic, precise, and validated for centuries, this cycle is positively subordinated to a heavenly process accomplished by the eternal and generous sun. One has to keep pace with the inevitable, reliable stability change of the seasons: after all, nature does not wait; it changes not only in the seasons but every week, daily and even hourly. She is always different!
As soon as light-green herringbone stems strike up to daylight, the spring that threatened to freeze these tiny creatures ends. However, summer in the North is not always gentle: at any time, it can chill with unexpected nightly frost or cook up with heat rapidly shrinking soil. So on the first warm days, every scum climbs out of the ground: milkweed, horsetail, raps, and hundreds of other weeds. For some reason, they sit in the field so tightly, putting down roots so deep that it is not easy to take out each weed.
At such times, women and girls have to find a free day, gather small children, take big baskets and go to the field to weed flax. Every squalid, left on the row, a germ of milkweed or the other weed will grow in five to six weeks into a disgusting unapproachable, arrogant, toxic-green, double-flowering shrub, which can be removed from the flax row only with a spade. That's why they work in a hurry with bruised hands.
It is OK; hopefully, everything will wash away during the bath and heal. But how good looks the weeded outfield: young flax, trampled underfoot, tends to straighten up after the first rain. It is growing by leaps, not by days but hours: a proverb has not a figurative but a literal sense.
Summer is in full bloom. In the fields, in the forest and at home, there is so much work that one has only to turn around. At this time, flax fleas appear, they will not be shy, and they devour entirely fragile, delicate stems. Flax is sprinkled with wood ashes to get rid of fleas.
At the same time, it does not hurt to fertilize flax plots, but the peasants had yet to learn any other fertilizers but manure, slurry, poultry manure and kiln ash. When the flax was in bloom, it seemed a deep blue of northern summer skies on the fields. Indescribably beautiful is flax during white nights.
Few noticed infinite blueness before the collective farms because the plots were too small. In the same collaborative farm sector, especially after the introduction of crop rotation, whole fields of flax and the blueness of flowering flax appeared. Only the colours of Dionysius can express the feeling of a strange combination of pale green with pale blue as if penetrating somewhere in the depth of colour. But one thing is to look at; another is to twirl flax.
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