Fallow

When I was a kid growing up in Detroit, we'd drive to Ohio a few times a year to visit our grandparents. They lived in the small town - no more than 15,000 people - where my father had grown up. As we left the city behind, my brother and I would say - "look, there are the corn field, we must be getting close!" We thought we were being funny - as city slickers we thought we were too sophisticated to have anything to do with farms. The town I live in now is far smaller than Salem, Ohio, and I no longer find anything to mock about farmland - I have nothing but respect and appreciation for farms on so many levels - for the hard work that goes into them, for how we depend on them to sustain us, for their beauty. It will be many months before this field is sown again, and many more before that brief golden moment in high summer when the sweet yellow ears are harvested and fresh corn arrives on our tables. It will be worth the wait. (Here's what this field looked like late last spring.