One of my favorite things to do on Saturday morning was to play on the hay fork in a friend’s barn. Dad’s barn was for dairy cows and was constructed on a hill. The cows came in the lower level to be fed and milked.

On the upper level, the horses could back the wagon into the barn for unloading. The hay was stuffed, as needed, through a hole in the barn floor and it fell to the lower level each feeding time. That barn needed no hay fork.

My friend Josie and I often exchanged overnight visits. Her father was a dairy farmer like Dad, but his barn was built on level ground, and his hay was stored by the use of a metal device called a hay hook or fork.

The big metal fork at Josie’s barn was a double-hook arrangement. It could grab a big clump of hay that had been cut in the fields, cured by the sun and then raked into wind rows and lifted by fellows with pitchforks onto a hay wagon. The wagon had framework on front and back to keep the load in place while it was hauled.

At the barn, the haulers drove the wagon to a strategic position at the front of the barn. Then they pulled ropes to lower the fork and open its jaws to take a large “bite” of hay from the wagon hay up to a hole in the front of the barn. There, the hay fork clicked into a metal track, which carried the load far back into the barn.

Another pull released the loose hay onto the stack in the loft. Men with pitchforks scattered the hay around the loft to make space for each successive load. We kids crawled on it, buried each other in it and bounced on it as today’s kids do on trampolines.

We spent a lot of time in that fragrant new hay, rolling and daydreaming, too. And we had a lot of hay fights until her father put a stop to that.

Looking back, I doubt that he’d have approved our riding that hay fork, if he had found out about it. I was one of the daring ones who’d hold to the fork while the others pulled me up the track until I was hanging high in the air with nothing underneath except the bare barn floor. “O.K., I’m ready,” I’d yell, and the others pulled another rope that sent me zooming down the track.

It was then my turn to operate the ropes for the next kid to fly through the air and land on the pile of hay.

Some kids were afraid to try that, but others rode time and time again. Because my body weight pulled hard on the muscles of hands, arms, chest and tummy, those areas were sore to the touch for a few days afterward. Sneezing and deep breathing were agony.

Those wonderful Saturdays rivaled anything we did as kids. I regret that my grandchildren never got to play in Josie’s barn on that wonderful hay fork. I wonder if I’d have missed all of that if we’d had cartoons and computer games.