They surrounded the house I grew up in. For more than half of any given year, the fields sat stagnant, flat and empty. Nothing growing in them except the occasional stray weed-- only dust as far as the eye could see.
Spring and summer brought life to the fields, an order of sorts. Clean straight rows of sprouting corn next to uninterrupted paths of dirt. As the days rolled on, the season progressed, the stalks grew to their full height-they were twice as tall as I was. Suddenly my eye could only see so far.
Sometimes at night, my friends and I would take flashlights and run as fast as we could between the rows. In a flurry of screams and wildly waving lights, we ran until our sides hurt but we never came close to running out of field. If we were daring, we would try it without the lights. Tripping over dirt clods and rocks in the dark, we followed each other by the sounds of the swaying plants in our wakes. Afterwards our skin was hot and covered in blood and welts where the leaves of the stalks cut into us.
Fall, winter brought the harvest and the corn was taken off somewhere, to a market or a factory. Left behind, a field strewn with the debris of the unusable parts of the plants. Eventually another tractor came dragging silver disks to till the land, everything buried indiscriminately. Flattened leaves, dead stalks, used dirt and our blood and sweat went deep into the ground to nourish and feed what would come in the next growing season.
|