Farmer's Spoils

 

Farmer’s Spoils

Imagine with me. Imagine working eighty and ninety hour weeks for months, only to have rainclouds literally wash the work away and your profits with it, as with it any hopes or dreams for financial peace that summer, while you watched it all in slow motion from the window of your home, minute by minute, hour by hour.

 Driving by flooded fields and seeing your crops drowning, going from healthy green to sickly yellow to rotten brown as the days pass, and to smell it, this rotten unhealthy stink of growing things turned to muck. To spend hours with a shovel under cloudy skies, digging drains in water and mud in the hopes to spa a single acre of crop for the reaper's scythe in the fall, and praying with all your heart that the sun might wait just a few hours to creep out, knowing that if the sun shone out that very minute it would burn the plants under the water the way an ant might burn under a magnifying glass.

 And there is nothing you can do stop the rain, your ditches are overflowing, there are men at the store exchanging glances of pity and helplessness, and the elderly farmers who never quite retired, who've been here before, they speak of thirty years ago when they replanted corn three times in a row watching each attempt wash away like chalk under a spigot, and they say the strong will persevere because this is part of it, of living off the land and on it and with it, taking the bad with the good in unequal measures.

 And when it rains yet again, the fourth time that week, you gather together in one man's equipment shop and discuss the fact that the plan that survive all this deluge won't be able to withstand any type of drought, because their roots are shallow on the surface and not deep, weak stringy things without the hardy strength to weather tropical depressions or hurricane winds or the days in July you all know are coming, when the hot humid sun will finally bear down on the land for weeks at a time without ceasing except in the cool clear night.

 And some men curse God and banks and the world, and others brag about whose land had the most inches of water, like having the worst flood was a badge of honor that proves they are tough, and other men are just silent, staring down at the hard concrete floor, specks of mud scattered across it like boot shaped constellations of brown stars in a gray sky, planning and calculating numbers and trying not to think about that rotten smell that clings to their clothes all the time now and the things their family would have to go without with the rest of the year.

 And your grandfather, halfway through his eighties and still showing up to work most days, comes into the farm office later and sits by you, watching the rain fall, again, it's raining again, God help us there goes another hundred acres, and he sighs and says "Farming is a little like war sometimes, a gamble and a jump of faith, dumb luck and unlucky circumstance all laid out in front of you, and you got to constantly be fighting, with your mind and with your hands, in the burning heat and the stinging cold, with bugs and grease and dust, but nothing else will ever make you feel so alive than watching the sun rise on your own land over your own crops and knowing you are bringing something into the world that the world needs, creating something more from less than nothing. Nothing quite like a war worth fighting."

Then he's quiet again, one of the quiet ones who plan and listen, most of the old farmers are, the sons who have seen it all and done it all and lived to tell about the disasters of the past, the people who've died or lost limbs through that dumb bad luck or their own bad choices, when a drought lasted years and a hurricane flattened ten thousand acres of corn the week before harvest, when a farmer down the dirt road his sixties crawled through his field on his knees with a burlap bag dragging behind him and picked up the heads of corn off the ground because he was stiff an couldn't bend over well.

When a man dies of a sudden heart attack in the middle of harvest and left behind a widow and three children and the entire community drives over their machines and pick his crop for free because that's what people who live like this do, who know that the rain hits everybody sometime somewhere, that no family or farm escapes untouched, all we have is each other and we're all here in the same boat of land, sometimes soaring on a good wind and other times bailing out the water bucket by bucket to keep from sinking.

 Imagine living like that.