Childhood Memories

Driving just outside Melbourne in late summer or autumn, you see these well packed and wrapped rolls of hay. There are no wheat or corn fields, but paddocks are very common. The hay brings back memories from my childhood, those of car trips through the mountains of Romania, where people piled the hay in large hill-like stacks by the side of the road. They were messy, man-made stacks, unlike the ones here that I captured in the picture, and were covered roughly with sheets of weathered, old plastic. We used to go to the mountains during the summer vacations only, when the heat in the plains chased us away. Once arrived in the mountains, we rode with the car window down, letting the freshly cut hay perfume our faces. Poppies and daisies sometimes smiled at us from the endlessly green landscape.