By Carrie Click

Post Independent Staff

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Back in my early 20s, a boyfriend from Texas taught me about “load-a-hay” – a particular maneuver that, if carried out correctly, is sure to bring good luck to anyone fortunate enough to know how to do it.

Here’s how to be assured of wildly good luck: Whenever you see a load of hay (alfalfa, grass, cow or horse hay, it matters not):

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– Lick the tip of your right thumb

– Brush your freshly-licked right thumb against the palm of your left hand

– Stamp, i.e. make a fist with your right hand and smack it against the palm of your left hand, while saying, “Load-a-hay!”

If done in the right sequence, you are guaranteed to have good luck.

Ever since I was taught that little trick, I can’t see a load of hay – whether it’s just a lone bale in the bed of a pickup truck, or a whole semi-trailer full of big round bales, without instinctively doing the hand-stamp move. It’s a ritual, like brushing my teeth.

I’ve counted on loads of hay to see me through good and bad. On really rotten days, seeing a gigantic load-a-hay on a huge semi-tractor trailer gives me just enough of a boost to turn my day around.

That’s why last winter I started questioning if the magic had gone out of my load-a-hay trick. From November to March I had a horrific string of bad fortune.

It started out with the saddest news in the world – one of my best friends died after a three-year battle with cancer.

That was followed about two weeks later with me hitting a 1,000-pound bull elk with my car, totaling the elk and my car.

A few weeks after that accident, I got to stay at Rifle’s finest new accommodations – that would be the Grand River Hospital – after having emergency surgery.

In a way, after the surgery, I was relieved. Things happen in threes, right? My bad luck was over, right?

Not yet. After about a month of healing after going under the knife, my husband Erik called me at work one afternoon to tell me that our cat, Bailey, had been hit by a car and killed.

And then, to top it off, on March 8, I was on a news assignment in Glenwood Canyon. I had parked my new car (remember: my old car had been totaled by the elk) at the Grizzly Creek rest area and left it locked up for a couple hours.

When I returned to the car, I could see that the window behind the passenger’s seat had been shattered by a rock or a hammer, and my wallet, which I had stowed under some papers in the back seat, was gone.

“I don’t think load-a-hay is working anymore,” I said to my friend Kelley Cox, this paper’s photographer.

What Kelley said turned the meaning of good luck on its ear.

“Oh Carrie, it’s working,” she said. “Just imagine if you hadn’t done load-a-hay. The elk collision could have killed you, and your surgery could have had major complications. And without load-a-hay, the guy who broke into your car might have still been around when you had come back. Who knows? He could have hurt you.”

If that’s not positive thinking, I don’t know what is. I still lost my dear friend Amy, and Bailey the sweet cat. But how lucky am I for everything that does go my way. It’s a good way to think about life.

So, I’ll keep doing the load-a-hay trick every single time I see a load of hay. And I’ll keep being grateful for how good life is.

Carrie Click is a reporter at the Post Independent. She’s had a string of good luck this May. Carrie Click is a reporter at the Post Independent. She’s had a string of good luck this May.