Really, it fell from the sky right into my car!
Okay, not really. But five bales of hay fell off a truck driving south in my town this evening. Two of the bales survived intact, one got bent, and the other two exploded, spewing puffy piles of free-roaming flakes in the middle of the lane.
I didn’t see it happen but encountered the wreckage I believe shortly thereafter. Being the conscientious type, I pulled over once I’d managed to swing wide past it without getting creamed by oncoming cars and carried, dragged, pushed the errant hay out of the travelled way into the emergency lane, which fortunately is wide there. Nice hay it was, too, soft, slender and fragrant.
No, I didn’t take any then. Some guy driving past northbound called to me as I was hay-wrangling that the truck was stopped around the corner with the driver tying down his load. So after finishing the rescue I went looking for the haywagon. Didn’t find it, not even a wisp to show where it might have paused.
So I went back, scooped up a bale’s worth of the loose hay, stuffed it in the back of my Saturn wagon, and drove to the barn to complete my evening’s errand: turning out my horse Ben and giving him his late hay. He got a mix of the usual and the liberated, with the extra going into my hay storage shed.
When I got back to the scene of the hayfall, the rest of it was still there. What to do, what to do… Would taking it be stealing?
I decided no, it would be a public service to remove debris from the main road of my fair town. By putting the rear seatback down and spreading out my handy tarp (carried, as it happens, for those occasions when I transport hay from my friends’ farm in the next town over) I was able to fit all four remaining bales’ worth into the car. Homeward I went, the wonderful aroma of fresh-cured hay filling my vehicle. Tomorrow it will go into my storage shed at the barn, fated to be fed out to an appreciative horse.
I figured it was the least I could do. 