Putting the hare out of the corn
August 2026
"The last bit of corn in the last of the farmer's fields was the visible symbol of the end of the harvest, and the cutting of this last bit was, all over Ireland, attended with some ceremony." - Kevin Danaher, The Year in Ireland
The end of August is when the year stops being about growing and starts being about finishing things up, and most of us have something by now that's neither growing nor finished, just sitting there taking up room at the back of the mind.
The 'messy middle' is the bit I can't stand either, personally, as my Jon regularly has to point out in an effort to get me to keep going through it!
For you, a chara, it might be a piece of work, a course you started, a conversation you keep meaning to have, or a whole season of effort you never actually closed off. The harvest month asks a blunter question than whether you've done enough though, it does be asking what you're willing to call done.
oof.
Irish farms marked the finish of the harvest with a bit of ceremony, back in the day, rather than letting it just trail off after a messy middle.
It went like this... a small patch of corn was left standing in the corner after the rest of the field was cut, everyone gathered round to see it, and the workers raised a shout to 'put out the hare', since some creature was always said to be sheltering in the last of the standing crop.
And so we know it clearly, the hare also represented the hag shapeshifted, the Cailleach, and the sovereignty of Ireland herself.
Irish folklorist Kevin Danaher records that 'putting the hare out of the corn' was how people said the harvest was finished, and in Kerry the end of it was called an clousur, the closure, which nobody declared until the oat stacks were thatched and the potato pits properly made. The Cailleach had moved on to the next part of the cycle.
The same account carries a detail that we can borrow, that the reaping hooks were sharpened finely at the final conclusion of the harvest before being stored away with their edges wrapped, because a tool put away dull is a tool that starts the next season badly.
So, today's working is for declaring one thing finished and setting it down clean, giving your own bit of work the close that the harvest always got.
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