The fields, brimming with hope, bustled with everyone's hard work.
As the sun gradually tilted westward, no one felt weary, and the laughter and chatter persisted.
Some were cutting the rice stalks; others were threshing; some carried the grain to the official road to be transported back to the village's drying grounds; others bound the straw from threshed stalks for easy drying, a method that involved just restraining the area right below the rice heads. Once bound and propped open with a flick of the wrist, these bound sheaves stood like graceful young maidens in the harvested fields, basking in the sunlight.
Apart from facilitating drying, these tidy bundles made it easy to carry back to the village and then stack into cylindrical hayricks, convenient for gradually taking home as firewood.
Moreover, these hayricks could be piled outside without fear of rain, which would only wet the top layer, so there was no need to worry if there wasn't enough room in the woodshed at home.
