Rainy days are one of the most unpleasant things about the harvest. You come to work, but you don’t get anywhere, try though you might. As long as it’s only a drizzle, it’s not that bad, you don’t make too much of a fuss; but when rain comes down in sheets, or thunder-showers pour down in buckets, leaving not a single dry thread on your body, then you have to stop working after all. So you sit there in your soaking clothes behind the stacks of sheaves, waiting impatiently for the weather to clear up, but one rainstorm has barely passed when a second one, perhaps even more violent than the first, sweeps in. Your body trembles with an uncomfortable sensation; you are half sweating, half freezing. When the sun finally reappears, the most important thing is getting back to work with twice the effort, because now you have to make up for as much lost time as possible. You barely allow yourself time to eat. With renewed vigor, you swing the sharp sickle; swath after swath falls, the laborer’s sweat dripping upon them. With nimble fingers, the female binders fasten sheaf after sheaf, barely straightening up to breathe more deeply. How many times does that sickle have to fall, how many sheaves have to be bound before a single morgen of grain is stacked up!
At long last, late in the evening, when your tired limbs are ready to give out, the day’s work comes to an end. The sun has set long ago and a misty evening darkness hovers over the fields; only then can you finally call it a day. After all, nature demands its due; your body must gather new strength. About an hour before we men finished work, my wife took the baby carriage and headed home, where supper would be ready when I got back at nine or ten o’clock. But I often went on working through the night, resting only an hour or two in a stack of sheaves. What two reapers can cut is usually more than one woman can stack – especially when the grain is heavy, so after my actual finishing time, I often continued stacking the sheaves that my wife had not managed; and sometimes, after rainy days, I had to resort to an additional night’s work to keep pace with the laborer next to me whose wife had gotten sick and could not help out.
For bringing in the harvest, the laborers received a daily wage, and food was also provided by the farmer. All available wagons and horse teams were employed to bring in the blessed harvest, and the operative question was: “What have you got, what are you capable of?” With the industriousness of bees, we load and unload wagon after wagon; and the horses trot briskly, even when pulling full loads, so that unnecessary pauses are avoided. There is no rest for the horses, none for the people either; after all, they know full well how much rides on their hard work and perseverance. And if the landowner shows up and says, “People, the weatherglass is full, we’re in for some rain!” then hardly another word will be spoken during work. In the barn, all you can hear is the clicking of pitchforks and the labored breath of the unloaders and stackers. One wagon is barely unloaded and rolled off the threshing floor, when another one, fully loaded, comes in; outside, the loaders are doing all they can to clear field after field. And so it goes, sometimes long after nightfall. Oh, after such a day – which often turns into a day and a half – you can really feel your limbs, and you know that you’ve really done something. Afterwards, my wife was frequently so overcome by exhaustion that she couldn’t keep her eyes open while nursing our baby.
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