The Fields of July

  

 July is here and oh boy howdy. This is sweetcorn time of the year.  You cannot beat this.

In my home rural farm, our old house was surrounded by corn or wheat fields. The wheat was harvested first, and then corn appears. The stalks grow anywhere from 8 to 12 feet. 

Running through corn stalks is nasty. The blades/leafs can hide are as scratchy and they cut too well. 

 Even so, we played hide and seek, tag, and chasing. The photos below are me pointing to a cow patty.

This is me, pointing at a cow patty.

I was active in finding and scooping up the patty.

Notice that the patty is the size of a toilet seat.

Checking product for correct dry and texture
Considering aerodynamic and wind direction.

 

 

 Yes, I am holding a cow patty. It was sanitized. I took back to my home where it was placed in the garden area. It slowly fell apart. Great memory. 

 

Cow patty's final resting place

My brother Don knows all the people and businesses here. The community loves and appreciates what Don and his son Jeremy do for special events like 

The Sweetcorn Festival of Chatham, Illinois 

This is a fundraiser for the use of someone in the community may have need.

Let me tell you this: Being with my brother Don is a gift and the most interesting person. He organized the use of the pasture to collect cow manure, and then he gave me a quick tutorial of the throw.  Then Don drove us on places that were part of his life. Don is a reverend at Laomi Methodist Church and a Chaplain at Memorial Hospital in Springfield, Illinois. 

So, that's all they wrote. Reliving part of our past, discovering what we didn't know---good times.

Change of the Seasons

Overlooking the Mississippi River.  Illinois on the left, Missouri on the right.

On a bright October afternoon, my brother Don took us on a drive along country roads that Mom had traveled many times over her 82 years.  The sky was glorious, one of those brilliant skies that changes tones of blue throughout the day.  The leaves had begun the magic that seeped from green to red and gold. 

...right there!

Everything held the sense of being so temporary.  The leaves and all their beauty would be a sodden mound of brown mulch in a few weeks.   

The sky would be filled with winter clouds.  And my mother—where and what would she be in weeks or months?  That was an unsaid question that floated over us along this drive along country roads and past harvested fields.

“I used to wade in the stream right there!” Mom exclaimed as we pulled off the road and down to the gravel stream bed.  Don and I ambled over to the water, talking in low tones about Mom, while she stayed in the car.  Don picked up a stone and skimmed it along a shadowy deep drop in the stream. 

“No, not there!  Further down…” Mom called out.  As fragile as she was and no matter how much each breath cost her, Mom would tell us the right way to go.

...you used to play there, Susie....

Later, we drove by a faded ancient house, one that leaned whichever way the wind was blowing.  The whole house gave the illusion that it was held up by the fact that the window frames were still square, and the front door was shut.  Other than that, the poor place was a lost cause.  

 “Oh, you used to play there, Susie,” Mom sighed.  Her hand pointed out the window.  “Over there Anna had a picnic table and we used to watch you kids while we…”  

 I looked at the hand with its transparent paper-thin skin, bulging blue veins, and bones.  So gnarled and painful now, those hands had held mine all my life.

After driving along back roads I never knew existed and hearing about the people who had once farmed that field, people who had lived in a house now a heap of rubble, we took Mom back to her home. 

Country road, goes on forever

While she napped in her recliner, I looked out her kitchen window, seeing some rain clouds moving in from the west.  The color of the air itself had transformed to gray.  I took a photo of a tree outside the kitchen window. 

“I wonder how many more times I will look out this window?”

The clouds moved in, the rain was almost weeping, and my mother slept for the rest of the afternoon.  I stood at the window, watching the leaves fall, and listening to the sound of the clock ticking on the piano.


P.S.  This was posted two years ago.  My daughter is having surgery and I will be busy this week. I thought this deserved a re-visit.  Susan Kane