Actually quite close to "actual" :idea:
Btw, I was brought up on a farm, wood as fuel, not gas!
Enjoy:
STOOKS
=======
After 5 minutes, I'd have some 20 of them standing up and I'd be so
bored that I'd wish I was anywhere else doing anything else, except
at high mass suffering through one of Father Ouimet's long winded
sermons.
If you're one of them city slickers, no way you've heard of stooks and
no, don't look it up in the dictionary: it's not there. Stook is a farm
slang and no one knows how it got started. Could be that (stooking being
a slow job) a farmer once got home a little late and said to his wife:
"gee haw, ma, s'took me all day to put up that 4-acre field". Also
possible that it comes from the word "stoop", since you have to stoop
down twice to build a stook, picking up 2 sheaves during each stoop.
Sheaves? Plural for sheaf, as leaves = leaf, except for the Toronto
Maple Leafs. Yes, sheaf is in the dictionary: "a quantity of the stalks
and ears of a cereal grass bound together" as explained by Mr. Webster.
Look, I know you don't really care about what a sheaf is, but gimme a
minute: I'm trying to explain as best I can what a stook is, and you'll
never understand unless you get a clear picture of a sheaf...pronounced
"shief" rhyming strongly with "chief".
Let wheat be Mr. Webster's cereal grass. Wheat grows to some 4 feet high.
Once it's yellowish, then it's ripe, and you cut it down. You gather
together as much as can be tied with a 2 feet long strong string. You're
left with a neat bundle of wheat. And that's a sheaf of wheat. Now, you
can change Mr. Webster's definition to " a bunch of wheat tied up with
binder twine".
Binder twine...what's that? Well, a binder is a special farm machine that
does it all: cuts the wheat, collects it, forms the right size bundles,
then ties up them bundles with a special strong string known as twine.
Agree, you could say "special-string-for-the-machine-that-makes-sheaves",
but farmers are busy and don't have time to say all that, so they prefer
"binder twine". By the way, this is the same kind of twine that's used in
the famous country song:
I keep my pants up with a piece of twine
And if you're mine...just pull the twine.
Here's how it's done. You hook your tractor to the binder, roll in the
ripe wheat field and then you start cutting. The binder collects the
falling wheat on a rolling tarp, forwards it to the binder twine section.
On the way there, funny looking mechanical arms step in and form bundles.
So, a bundle at a time gets to the binder twine section, where a really
real funny looking piece of gear takes over and ties up the bundles and
there you go: sheaves! Each sheaf is then kicked up and away to land on
the ground. When the job is over, you're left with a razed field covered
with neat rows of sheaves.
You don't leave them sheaves laying all over the place. You stoop and
pick up 2, 1 in each hand, stand the little critters up in a way that
leaves the bases some 2 feet apart, and then you bring the 2 heads
together, then juggle until they remain standing on their own. Then you
stoop again to pick up 2 more, stand them up against the first 2, in a
way that leaves you with something that looks a bit like a wigwam. And
that's a stook. And putting up stooks is stooking. And stooking is
booooring...
Mr. Fraser, my English Lit teacher at Glengarry District High School,
told us to always end up with a conclusion. So, to conclude: a stook's
made up of 4 sheaves, that's 4 sheaves picked up off the ground, to the
ground that's 4 gone sheaves...and how's that for a fourgone conclusion!
