My grandfather-in-law has a beautiful blue Brabant draft team which he grades the driveway, feeds round bales throughout the winter, plows, uses for parades, just about everything. This year he planted ten acres of oats with his team. We arrived early yesterday morning and harnessed up the team and fired up the old McCormick thrashing machine with belts moving every which way. We traveled from shock to shock with pitchforks loading the wagon. Once the wagon was full we hitched a ride on the back of the wagon to the thrashing machine to unload. Stack by stack we unloaded the pile heads first as the antique machine pulled them in one by one and shot a stack into a large pile and the oats into the wagon. Once the wagon was full, the horses were hitched and pulled their load to the bins as we shoveled the oats out. It was a day of hard work and blisters abundant, but at the end of the day we glimpsed over the bare field with tired satisfaction and gratitude for days long gone. I have much appreciation for the hard work of the horse drawn era and a little bit of jealousy for the simple happiness and pride they must have felt when the sun set each day.