A [Hotel] Room of One's Own: Hay’s in the Barn, but Straw’s Cheaper

For TLF’s Content Manager Alex Creange, there are few things better than traveling alone. A [Hotel] Room of One’s Own is her tribute to striking it solo, whether for a stroll around the neighborhood or an international adventure.

Before my mind was clouded by the clarity-inducing brush strokes of adulthood, my childhood vocabulary was fortified by Grammy’s colorful collection of catch phrases. A sponge for language, I hung on to every word my grandmother spoke, adopting her homespun dialect as my own. At her house I wore “dungarees” and “babushkas” while eating chips and “selsa” (the dip), not to be confused with “selsa” (the sparkling beverage). As a kid I thought walking to “see-da lane” was a suggestion to admire the scenery, rather than the address of our intended destination between Beechwood and Cypress. And I was probably a teenager before I realized that the residue of a bitten lip is not, in fact, spelled “kanka saw.”

In those halcyon days of my childhood, in her linoleum kitchen that smelled of coffee grinds and cigarettes, Grammy turned phrases like “don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining” (a literary allusion to Judge Judy’s book) while rolling stuffed cabbage or stirring some kind of goulash on the stove. If the high pitched ring of her yellow wall-mounted telephone dared to interrupt 1010 Wins, her chatter of pleasantries usually concluded with a sigh: “yeah well, come see, come saw.” Her neither here nor there reply, I would later realize, had everything to do with butchered French, and nothing to do, as I once imagined, with a teeter totter. I now wonder if she realized this as well.

“Grammy’s patois was flecked with the devil-may-care attitude of a plucky woman who never once worried what other people might think of her”

Rooted in a working class, ESL upbringing, Grammy’s patois was flecked with the devil-may-care attitude of a plucky woman who never once worried what other people might think of her. She owned mispronunciations with gusto, and couldn’t be bothered with corrections. She had a knack for making things up: she called me her “mauvereen” (apparently Gaelic for “my darling?”) but also had an inability to string certain sounds together. For years she lived around the corner from a deli called Lasolas, but had an unfailing commitment to replacing the second “l” with a “d.” So imagine the fit of laughter that erupted any time I tried to coax the name of my alma mater — Loyola — from her.

Of all the things Grammy liked to say, and she liked to say a lot, my favorite expression of hers was “Hay’s in the barn, but straw’s cheaper.” It was her go-to retort any time my cousins and I yelled “hey” at one another. The phrase “The Hay’s in the Barn,” is primarily used by the unlikely duo of farm folk and sports announcers. It means the hard work is done, and implies there’s nothing left to do but wait for an outcome. The addendum about the straw is purely Grammy, a classic made-up phrase she adopted as her own.

Since Grammy was neither a farmer nor an athlete, I like to envision how she came up with such a slogan. I picture her sitting in the living room, crocheting, as the Jets game blares from the speakers of the 48-inch Magnavox, my grandpa turning the volume to an ear-aching decibel, drowning out the din of seven children. With minutes left in the game, the sportscaster says something like “well the hay’s in the barn now,” and Grammy, paying no attention to the game but zeroing in on these words, shoots an “Oh yeah? And straw’s cheaper!” — a self-deemed clever comeback to delight no one but herself.

Of course, I’ll never really know where “Hay’s in the barn, but straw’s cheaper” came from or why she liked to say it so much. As a kid, I took Grammy at her word. I never questioned what she told me, never asked her what she meant. She passed away in 2019, and though there are many days I’m grateful she didn’t live to see 2020 — her two-packs-of-parliament-in-box lungs would have been no match for COVID — there are days I wish she was still here, just so I could ask her all the questions I never knew I had.

Though I’m fairly certain there’s no allegorical message behind most of Grammy’s words, this proverbial hay has been on my mind a lot recently. In a year like 2020, the barn of my brain feels too goddamn full to even think that straw might have been cheaper. After nine months of this misery, there’s no room for second guessing. This year has sucked, for so many people in so many ways, but when I think about the hay, and the barn, and the straw, I can construct a farmload of meaning on my own. “Hay’s in the barn, but straw’s cheaper” means “the hard work is done, but don’t rest on your laurels,” or “you’ve come this far, now keep going,” or “this sucks, but it could be a lot worse.” I hear a reflection. I hear a motivator. I hear a reason to believe. But most of all, I hear my grandmother’s voice, reassuring us that everything will be okay.

And what, you ask, does any of this have to do with solo travel, the nascent theme of my blog column? Nothing. It has absolutely nothing to do with solo travel. Just like Grammy, I make the rules up as I go.