When I was a little girl, I used to have a well-worn nursery rhyme book. I loved all the rhymes in it– they were a staple of my, well–what I thought was– my tranquil childhood. Yet, as an adult, clearly I didn’t get the jest of these children’s mostly morbid rhymes–like the cradle falling with a baby in it and the song about the black plague as we danced and all fell down. It’s really a wonder that the steady diet of these “nursery” tales didn’t turn us all into grown up M. Night Shyamalans.
One of my favorites–and far less morbid, was the one about the lazy farmer “Little boy blue”. I’ve always loved a good nap story. But I could never quite picture the boy comfortable enough to be “under a haystack fast asleep” since the only haystacks I ever saw as a teenager in Oregon were ones built from blocks of itchy scratchy rock-hard hay bales. And I’m all about sloughing off a day of minding sheep but napping under scratchy hay bales–seemed quite impossible. (Let’s not even get into the probability of rocking a baby on a tree top.)
As we headed back to the boat at the end of our week-long roadtrip, we got our first look at REAL haystacks. The kind you could get under and fall fast asleep. These sky-high Bosnian haystacks, restored the idyllic nature of what my five year-old self thought a nursery rhyme should be.
That Mother Goose was a violent one wasn’t she?! Thank goodness for the cool shade of a Bosnian hay bale. A shout out to Bosnia for softening the reality of at least one tale from my childhood.
