Thrashing Day on the Farm

Edna Mae Bradley Gregory writes about thrashing day on the farm when she was young:
The Thrashing Day Routine:
Thrashing always came in mid-July to early August. As children we were excited because the neighboring families always exchanged help. Together the women prepared the big meals at each other's houses. While we were small we ran errands, but children always had a chance to play. Thrashing highlighted summer days for us.
In my earliest memories thrashing days commenced with the arrival of the thrashing machine hauled into our fields by steam-engine, and as I grew older, by John Deere tractor. Many neighbors arrived in horse-drawn wagons. The women and children stayed at the house to prepare the Big Meal; the men on the horse-and-wagons, went to the fields, and brought in the grain; where it had been shocked to cure as much as a week before. My dad liked to tease me. He would say, "Get your shorts on, Sister. Its time to shock the wheat!"
At the old wood stoves the women busily made meat loaves, or salmon loaves on Fridays; fresh loaves of bread, huge pots of mashed potatoes, cooked vegetables from the garden, and gallons of hot coffee. The pies had been made the day before in the wood-stove ovens set out in the yard. The women tested the ovens for hotness by holding their hands near. If the hair on the back of the hand singed; but the skin didn't burn when held almost in the oven, it was ready for pie baking. The pies made during thrashing days incorporated the fresh fruit in season such as apples, cherries, mulberries, blueberries, and elderberries.
We kids filled pails with water and fetched it back and forth. We were the running water! Electricity hadn't made it to the farms yet and plumbing involved a hand pump, wash basins, kitchen sinks, drains and pails to carry the water to the sinks or wash basins. We set towels and homemade soaps on the wash stands laden with basins of cool, fresh water under the yard trees. As the men came in shifts from the fields to eat, they stopped at the stands to wash off the dirt and sweat of the morning, before the midday dinner. We children had to dump the used water and refill the tubs for the next group between shifts.
One scary early Thrashing Day memory I have came when one of the men on the thrashing gang noticed smoke coming from a ten acre wood-lot located on Dad's farm. All of the thrashers rushed down there, formed a bucket brigade, and finally got it out; but not until it burned all the undergrowth and small saplings. It took years to re-grow that little wood-lot. The gang saved the sugar-maple woods. We continued to produce maple syrup in the following years, a highly profitable, early March activity.