The summer sun had ripened the grain. Dark, ochre-coloured ears of wheat, rippling gently in the breeze, were waiting for the harvest.
Grandpa sowed wheat and rye, rotating the arable fields from year to year to achieve a better yield. I remember harvesting the barley by the fence, its full ears already beginning to bend toward the ground. It could no longer wait, and one morning the scythemen arrived and the harvest began.
Just as the grass was mown, so too was the grain.
On their scythes, below the lower handle, the scythemen would fasten a suitable stick to the kosište. At its lower end, near the metal blade of the scythe, another stick would hold it out roughly a forearm’s length from the kosište, forming a triangle that served as a guide for pushing aside and laying down the cut grain.
Row by row, the grain was laid neatly on the ground, waiting to be tied into sheaves.
The women also joined the harvest—Grandma and my aunts. With sickles, slowly, handful by handful, they would cut the grain and lay it aside.
Following behind the scythemen, the grain was tied into sheaves.
While the sun beat down, I worked alongside the others, wiping sweat from my forehead. I would take a handful of grain and, taking two stalks as thick as my hand could hold, tie them together like a cord. I would lay this on the ground and, gathering the cut grain onto it, tie the sheaf with the ends of the grain cord.
I would lift the finished sheaves from the ground and carry them to the stacks, arranging the tips of the ears toward the centre and covering them with other sheaves.
It wasn’t particularly hard work, but it was long and seemingly endless. There was always another swath, another field, and the sun just kept beating down.
At last, the harvest came to an end—but the work was not finished.
The grain still had to be threshed, so that its golden kernels could be obtained. Those kernels meant life through the long, cold, windy, and snowy Lika winter.
The grain was threshed the following day on the gumno, the threshing floor.
The gumno was in the yard, directly in front of the entrance to the house, in what is today the plum orchard where we like to sit in the shade of the plum trees.
It was a beautiful level area, a circular earthen platform cleared of dust and grass, with a wooden post about a metre high standing in the centre.
Threshing was done by untying the sheaves and spreading them in a circle around the post. Žuja or Siva was tied to the post with a grain cord, and the horse was led first in one direction and then the other, winding and unwinding its path around the post.
The grain was freed from the ears and rolled across the straw, falling onto the earthen surface.
The threshed straw was separated, while the grain was gathered and tossed in the wind to blow away the chaff and remaining pieces of straw.
The clean grain was stored in sacks and awaited autumn and the rains, when it would be taken to one of the mills on the Jadova to be ground.
I remember three mills, of which today only stone foundations and the occasional millstone remain in the riverbed.
One stood on a side channel by Graovčeva Pećina; another was Alaginac, near the Djakovac spring, where there were several mills at that spot, built along the dam across the Jadova; and the last was near the Popović Bridge, whose final beam was carried away by the river three years ago.
The horses did most of the hard work during threshing.
Their coats and manes would foam with sweat pouring from every pore, and white foam sometimes appeared at their mouths from the exertion.
It was not easy for them, taking turns and treading steadily over the sheaves of grain, waiting for the end of the day when they could finally rest on the straw which, serving as their bedding, would remain their comfortable and warm place of rest in the stable until the following year.
Željko Narančić