When it is sunny in June, my father gets in his first cutting of hay. He starts on the creek meadows, which are flat, sandy, and hot. They are his driest land. This year, vacationing from my medical practice, I returned to Vermont to help him with the haying.

The heft of a bale through my leather gloves is familiar: the tautness of the twine, the heave of the bale, the sweat rivers that ran through the hay chaff on my arms. This work has the smell of sweet grass and breeze. I walk behind the chug and clack of the baler, moving the bales into piles so my brother can do the real work of picking them up later. As hot as the air is, my face is hotter. I am surprised at how soon I get tired. I take a break and sit in the shade, watching my father bale, trying not to think about how old he is, how the heat affects his heart, what might happen.

This is not my usual work, of course. My usual work is to sit with patients and listen to them. Occasionally I touch them, and am glad that my hands are soft. I don't think my patients would like farmer callouses and dirty hands on their tender spots. Reluctantly I feel for lumps in breasts and testicles, hidden swellings of organs and joints, and probe all the painful places in my patients' lives. There are many. Perhaps I am too soft, could stand callouses of a different sort.

I feel heavy after a day's work, as if all my patients were inside me, letting me carry them. I don't mean to. But where do I put their stories? The childhood beatings, ulcers from stress, incapacitating depression, fears, illness? These are not my experiences, yet I feel them and carry them with me. I search out these stories in my patients, try to recognize them, try to find healthier meanings. I spent the week before vacation crying.

The hay field is getting organized. Piles of three and four bales are scattered around the field. They will be easy to pick up. Dad climbs, tired and lame, from the tractor. I hand him a jar of ice water, and he looks with satisfaction on his job just done. I'll stack a few more bales and maybe drive the track for my brother. My father will have some appreciative customers this winter, as he sells his bales of hay.

I've needed to feel this heaviness in my muscles, the heat on my face. I am taunted by the simplicity of this work, the purpose and results, the definite boundaries of the fields, the dimensions of the bales, for illness is not defined by the boundaries of bodies; it spills into families, homes, schools, and my office, like hay tumbling over the edge of the cutter bar. I feel the rough stubble left in its wake. I need to remember the stories I've helped reshape, new meanings stacked against the despair of pain. I need to remember the smell of hay in June.