Harvest

   On a stifling summer's day in the middle of a wheat field, the most effective way to cool down is to stop the combine, side-step to the back where the cooler is filled with grape soda, and choose the can suspended in the most ice. Perspiration beading down the side of the can transfers into the hot epidermal cells of your eager hand as you lift the can to your lips. The sound of Uncle Bob's voice over the P.A. system means that it's time to hurry back into the cab, because the grain truck is coming, and it's time to watch the transfer. These are the golden days, literally; the wheat is that beautiful glowing color. The sky is the best thing you've laid eyes on since a cool glass of water, because it's the only thing for miles reminiscent of the idea of cool.

  While Papa Daryll talks to Uncle Bob, and the P.A. system fuzzes in and out, I try to sneak a tape change. Papa loves Hank Williams; I love Lefty Frizzell. We are always at an impasse. But Papa doesn't seem to notice the music, and if there's anything better than watching the grain transfer, it's watching it to the soundtrack of fiddles, and barroom pianos, and that twang Lefty's got so good. I'm hard-pressed to think of a place I'd rather be... until I see the brown lunch sack in Uncle Bob's truck. It's heat, hard work, and hunger going hand-in-hand, the trifecta of a harvest day, which makes food delicious. I think about that correlation and salivate. (It mixes in with the sweat on my face so probably no one will notice.) The wheat grain is pouring ferociously out of the long green arm of the combine into the back of the grain truck, and then suddenly, it stops. I know to wait for the final sputters of reluctant grain, and for the arm to rest once again in its place on the combine, before I leap down the ladder and jump into the truck. Leaping and jumping, and if I had a pole, probably vaulting-- these machines are giants in the flat land.   

  My grandparents' harvest is a family affair. The wheat fields of Wilbur are less about monetary gain, and more about lifestyle; yeah, the stereotypical "small-town" lifestyle, written about to irritation in the At Home in Mitford series, my mother's homesick reads. Wilbur is a small town. For most people, Wilbur exists for thirty seconds on Highway 2. But for me, my siblings, and anyone who's experienced harvest on my grandparent's farm, the small-town is sacred. The wheat fields are not a backwards country, a forgotten place, a middle-of-nowhere. The wheat fields are dust-twisters and combine tracks, open jeeps and four-wheelers, and water-runs out to the men. They are where Grandpa sings and grins, Uncle Dan tells dirty jokes over the P.A., and Cousin Christopher is always "gettin' that damn combine stuck on the hill."

  Harvest is a time for Grandma's prize-winning rolls, which perfectly complement her California Chicken dish (a fan-favorite). Harvest on my grandparent's farm is a pickle carefully wrapped and express-shipped out to Papa before it cools, because that's what he loves so much. There, living on my grandparent's farm, I learned to bake a raspberry pie as well as I could drive a combine. I learned to eat with company as well as I could sit with myself ten hours a day. If there was a valuable lesson to be learned, it was learned by doing. And what I learned is, working and living like they do on the farm is satisfying. The farm is one of those places in the world where a person can feel productive, content, loved, and happy. I learned that those are sacred feelings.

  These sacred farms are scattered throughout America, farms like my grandparents', where love and work are everyday values, where heat, exhaustion, and hunger are what you feel at the end of the day; and where, in the light of the harvest moon, you thank the amber rays that life is as good as it could possibly be.

There's no place I would rather be.

-Jenaleigh Flones
Published in the August/September 2012 issue of Wheat Life Magazine http://wheatlife.org/index.html

Defining a Yearning

  Sometimes I just yearn for it. I cannot think of a better word than "yearn", although, and I don't know if it's peculiar to me, I connote a sort of sexual eagerness to the word.  It's not sexual though, but if I had to be a neuroscientist and make a hypothesis about it, I'd suggest that the neural connections buzzing in my brain whenever I get this yearning run a similar course to the sexual yearn. I think the difference between the sex yearn and this yearn is I don't imagine the adrenaline as hot, sweaty blood coursing through my body... it is cooler, denser... less salty.


  Apparently, according to my journal, I yearn for it much more than I do for boys-- because I have never scribbled poetry about a boy before. But one night high on oxycodone (an honest drug to relieve the pain of an honest injury), I guess I wrote poetry about it. I open my journal almost biannually, and on one such rare occasion, I found the poem I had (apparently) written in illegible left-hand jottings. As I set myself to the task of transcribing the poem into less-illegible, right-handed jottings I began to feel the yearning again-- a strange, strong yearning.

        
          Cool, like the clear river water,
          Slipping sweetly over our skin
          on those perfect days in June

          as the sun was slowly replacing the moon

                 
   I felt it--the yearning. It was strange, strong, and similar to the feelings felt that summer I worked in the welding shop. That summer I was covered in steel dust, face and teeth; black eyebrows silvered with slivers of steel. We worked inside smelting pots, those giant heat-convectors that hold molten aluminum. "Before the aluminum would ever be poured into the pot," I often thought, "They'll sure have a job removing the molten body melted into the corner I am welding shut." It was so hot, so incredibly hot that an urge and a yearning would rise from the few uncooked organs in my heat-stroked belly whenever I looked across the highway and down the hillside that led to the river-- that deep-chill, black-blue, I-need-to-jump-into river.

               

   I want to jump into the parts where no plumb line could determine the depth. I want to feel that fear of the unknown watery world transform into some fear that is manageable, and beautiful. I want to conquer. I want to enjoy. I want to wade in the shallows. I want sunshine and water to mingle and become liquid light between my fingers. And at night, if I'm lucky, I want the light of the moon to turn the water into dark ink, and I want to slip into it without making a ripple, and I want to feel the river rushing over me, and the rocks beneath my feet, and the sediment ever moving downstream. I want to sit on the bank, on the beach, on the dock and stare at it, inhaling the cool of the chilled air that rests inches above the river in reluctance to rise to mix into the warmer atmosphere.

         
          Content to sit cool and still as we were,

          Emulating the air

          Emulating the cool of the air

          its rise above the water

          Content to sit there

METAL HEALTH

When you need to rock out:
Listen to Metal Health

LUNCHÉ!!

I've decided to start writing about these past 10 months... the months I spent as a welder.. so that I do not forget them. We'll see what, if anything, makes the blog. But here, to help me remember! 

some photographic evidence of my time there:

The Weld Shop

My Machine

<-- Me!
Okay.. so. The machine above is a multi-process L-Tec 650 cv/cc DC power source. It can perform in cv (MIG) or cc (TIG, stick). We used it for two purposes: MIG welding and air-arcing. MIG is a weld process that uses a wire-feeder, carbon dioxide gas, and a DC power current. Basically, I held this heavy plastic gun, connected to a huge rubber cord, which was connected to a big powerful machine. I would aim the gun at the steel. I would pull the trigger, and when I did wire and electricity would shoot out with such heat as to weld the steel together. Or cauterize your coveralls. or gore through your hand. (in my nightmares). Air-arcing employs a copper electrode and the force of pressurized air. The electrode is for INSTANTLY GOUGING HOLES OUT OF SOLID STEEL. the air flow is for blowing the molten-hot-blood-red-flesh-burning-steel the F out of the way before your sleeve catches on fire, your skin sears, you choke back angry tears, and your hope disappears. 

And the T-51 Pot, product of our travails:

BIG PRICKLY BUGS. BIG BUGS.

These incredible beings are of the order Phasmatodea

binomial nomenclature:

 Extatosoma tiaratum

AKA Walking Sticks

or, leaves

beautiful, slow-moving leaves. I could have sat there all day just to watch the bug traverse the expanse from my thumb to my pinky. 

Making sense of rhythm (for a white girl sure is hard).

But Coltrane helps.

In Memoriam John Coltrane

       

     Listen to the coal

rolling, rolling through the cold

        steady rain, wheel on

   wheel, listen to the

turning of the wheels this night

       black as coal dust, steel

 on steel, listen to

these cars carry coal, listen

    to the coal train roll.

MICHAEL STILLMAN