The spring I turned ten, a lot of things were going on in the world.  I wasn’t particularly aware of any of them.  But one thing had come forcibly to my attention:  I was going to have to learn the multiplication tables.  The little country school I attended had firm grade-level bench marks.  The ones for grammar and reading, I hardly noticed.  While spelling sometimes gave me problems, I could usually get by.  But arithmetic was something else again.

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The stuff just didn’t make sense to me.  Well, yes, I understood about counting, and some about measuring because of learning to cook, but real arithmetic made me want to go screaming for my box of crayons or a good book.

Nonetheless, all fourth graders were supposed to know their times tables and I did not know mine.  It became a matter of grave discussion; should I be held back because of this default? Failing school was not acceptable in my family.   My mother and grandmother made a deal with the teacher:  if I knew how to multiply by the start of school in the fall, I could go on to fifth grade.

Kid-like, I blew it off.  Summer had come; I was more interested in climbing trees, reading books and fishing than I was in studying dry and dusty numbers.

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When July rolled around, my grandmother put her foot down.  I would learn my times tables, and I would know them before August.  I practiced them in the morning as we washed and dried dishes together; I practiced them in the garden as we hoed and weeded.  I practiced them in the afternoon while we peeled fruit for canning.

As we went along, I began to get better at reciting the times tables.  I had 2’s and 5’s conquered long before, and three’s weren’t so bad.  Four’s had a kind of pattern to them and so did six’s.  Nines were almost magical in the way they fit together, but 7’s and 8’s still were giving me trouble as we moved into haying season.

Haying was a big deal on our little family farm.  My uncle would mow the hay late in the evening.  It would (hopefully) dry in the sun a day or two till it was cured. Then Grandma would hitch the dump rake to the tractor, and I would ride the rake.  Now, for those of you who have never seen one of these interesting creatures, a dump rake looks like a giant garden rake on wheels.  The operator sits on a seat in the middle of the rake, and uses a pedal to lift the tines to let the load of hay “dump” out of the rake in a timely fashion to form the hay into long windrows.

As soon as the evening chores were done, or maybe even before, my uncle would take the hay baler out and run it up and down the long rows of hay.  The bales were rectangular in those days; not the big round jobbies you see in the fields now.  Our first baler used wire to hold the bales together.  The hay was picked up by a sort of revolving brush that fed it into a screw which forced it into a sort of long tube.  At intervals, wooden blocks would drop into the tube.  Someone would then have to thread the wires through special holes in the blocks, and then tighten them up on the bales manually.  If this sounds like a lot of work, you are very right! 

When a neighbor was selling off farm equipment, a new baler was purchased.  This one used twine string and had an automatic tier.  The new baler made haying quite a bit less of a chore.

It was still hard work, however.  As soon as milking was done, everyone grabbed a sandwich and headed out to the field.  Because my uncle swore that I headed straight for the hay bales and drove over the top of them, I helped grandma stack the bales on the hay wagon while my mother drove and uncle “bucked” the bales up onto the moving platform.

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For those of you who have never tried this particular exercise,  bucking a hay bale works like this:  Grab it by its strings, being careful not to bow the hay out of its binding.  Swing it up about waist level, and use your knee to give it a boost so you can get underneath it to throw it up on a wagon or truck.  (Yes, when I got older, I worked on the ground loading the darned things.  I’ve bucked my share of hay-bales.)

When the wagon was loaded, we would climb on top of the swaying load of hay, and ride back to the house, where the hay would be unloaded and stacked in the barn.  Each trip back–yep, you got it–Grandma would drill me relentlessly on those darned times tables.

To this day, I can remember lying on my back on the prickly hay with a big, old yellow moon shining down on us, reciting “seven sixes is 42, seven seven’s is 49…”   It was one of those nights that the seven’s finally made sense, and I realized that having memorized all the others, I now knew my eights as well.

I never did learn to add.  I have to stop and think fairly hard about the so-called “math facts”, the little basic numbers added together. However, I passed my subsequent years of arithmetic by trading on a growing facility to multiply and divide.  I even made it through long division and square roots.

Until algebra, and the square root of negative one put a permanent stumper to my mathematical progress.  Thank goodness I don’t have to rely on it or on bucking hay bales to earn a living!