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The dog days of summer are here. Many believe that the name dog days comes from the star Sirius, which rises and sets with the sun. The ancient Egyptians called Sirius the Dog Star and along with the ancient Romans argued that it was responsible for adding heat to the day. The period of time from 20 days before to 20 days after the star’s conjunction with the sun were called “the dog days of summer.”

I think the name dog days comes from the misery of having a hot, panting dog crowded against you at all times — even when you go to the trouble of buying a kiddy pool and turn it into a doggy dip, fully knowing that the bottom of the plastic pond will turn into a green algae hotbed within a few days.

In a strange sort of way, I kind of miss the scummy pool this year since our champion panting dog Alex died this spring. And frankly I’d take the heat and humidity of summer over the bone-chilling 30-below weather of winter.

Our family did not have air conditioning when I was growing up and as far as I recall, there was never any serious conversation about getting it installed. We had a box fan or two and an ancient fan that was shaped like a cash register, with the motor on the bottom and the vent on the top. It barely moved the air and always emitted the smell of oil, although my brother and I swore that it was operated by rats running in a cage.

Even though we didn’t have A/C, the house was pleasant and cool compared to the barn. There always seemed to be a direct correlation between the hottest days of the summer and the amount of hay that needed to be baled. It was almost as if Dad could sense a heat wave coming on so he timed the hay harvest perfectly.

One of the most boring farm jobs had to be raking hay. I spent many long hours sitting on the iron seat of an old Ford tractor driving up and down the fields, turning the hay over so it would dry and be ready for baling. We had a series of old rakes, including one that was once pulled by horses because it had a seat on the rake and the wheels were iron.

Baling hay used to require one person driving the tractor and one or two people riding on the hay wagon to stack the bales as they came out of the baler. We used iron hooks to grab the bales and move them around.

I still have a scar on the top of my head (some say the injury went far deeper than that which explains why I became a journalist) when the load shifted one day and my brother’s bale hook found my skull instead of a bale.

We became a more modern farm in the mid-1970s when we got a kick-baler, which fired the bales into the wagon. Today, some farmers use big round balers, removing any kind of human handling at all.

On a good day we’d put up about 1,000 to 1,200 bales of hay or about 10 loads. My cousins were usually recruited on haying days to help out and we’d have two unloading and two or three stacking in the hay barn.

Sometimes when people complain about the heat, I ask them if they’ve ever worked in a hay mow when it’s 95 degrees outside. I usually get a strange glance and people quickly shift the conversation to sometime else. Mow, which rhymes with cow, is what you call the place in the barn where the hay is stored. And when you’re getting close to the top of a metal roof with very little air movement, 95 degrees seems refreshing.

Between loads we’d head to the milk house and consume copious amounts of water, sticking our heads under the faucet to cool off. Then we’d sprawl out on our makeshift furniture — bags of feed — and contemplate how many more loads we’d have to do that day, argue about whose turn it was to wash up the milking equipment and when was the next time we were going to build a dam in the creek or go swimming.

Don’t get me wrong. It was and is hard work. But there are some days when I’d just as soon cleanse my pores over stacking hay bales than rack my brain with office work and stack piles of paperwork on my desk.

Maybe I could just bale up all the paperwork and move it around the office — I mean the mow.

Chris Hardie is publisher of the River Valley Newspaper Group’s Weekly and Shopper Division.