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