The annual hayride

I think fall is the traditional time of year when one might find herself on a hayride, no?

Well, open your mind and set aside your visions of pumpkins and apple cider and cozy sweaters! For my mom's side of the family, hayrides happen annually on the first Sunday in June. Well, we call it the hayride.  I'm not sure if hay has ever actually been involved.  (It wasn't this year, at least.) My uncle drives the tractor, my extended family (at least 20 of us) sits on benches on the trailer behind the tractor, and we drive all over the farmland by my grandma's house in rural Minnesota.

The whole ride takes an hour or two, typically after a big old barbecue and before cake to celebrate some summer birthdays (including my grandma's). This year I ran that half-marathon and then Josh, my brother, Wish and I hurried up to join the party and I ate a gigantic amount of taco dip in addition to the rest of the barbecue. (And somehow I was hungry again by the end of the hayride. Go figure.)

Summer in Minnesota is gorgeous and green, and I would argue that it's even more beautiful in a rural area.  The sky is so, so expansive and the green, of course, is a pivotal part of life on a farm in the summer. Prepare yourself for an onslaught of cloud and horizon photos.  I couldn't help myself.  The clouds kept changing!

Ready? Okay.

I think I will look back at this post in the winter and swoon with the memory of how warm it was and how relaxed I was with the June sun shining down and a breeze blowing through the fields. (I am not sure what a swoon actually looks like, by the way, but it feels like the right verb to use.)

Are you wondering where Wish fit into this adventure?  Well, he stayed back at my grandma's house with Josh.  That was the plan all along, although it turned out that he wasn't a major fan of a tractor's running engine, much to my uncle's chagrin. (We'll get Wish ready in time for next year's hayride!) Apparently he didn't mind sitting next to a tractor, though - as long as it was idle.

Wish was so sweet with my family. It didn't hurt that his afternoon consisted of sitting outside in the shade with the freedom to roam around the radius of two leashes hooked together.  The rest of his afternoon was spent being petted by my cousins, aunts and uncles. He was in a good mood, to say the least.

By the way, this is one of my very favorite photos of life with Wish.

He can hide, but I think the ears will always give it away.

We've been setting his expectations high with our weekend shenanigans: first up north to Mille Lacs and now this. I speculated that he's going to get bored with normal life in St. Paul during the week because of how exciting his first few weekends have been.  (And don't be like a certain member of my household, who said in response to this theory, "He doesn't know what weekends are." Hmph!)

Wish, there will be plenty of time to hang out closer to home later in the year. The sooner you learn that Minnesota summer weekends are a special piece of life, the better.