My mom is fond of discussing soybeans and wheat. Particularly, what
fields of soybean and wheat look like at different times of the year.
The smell of a feathered field, moments after the chaff flies. The
verdant rows of a crop that for so long sustained the people where I'm
from. Not in the form of hormone-laced tofurky, but as a commodity,
grown, harvested and purchased responsibly. Even today, with relative
freedom to live anywhere, she can not leave the Middle West, can not
leave a place with visible growing seasons, a place where the weather
reminds her of work ethic, where the pummel of rain is a respite; an
incantation, convincing you of God, for a moment.
My daughter
plays with a bell when she visits my mother, its worn, wodden handle
turned blonde from use. The brass clapper at the mouth dangles just
long enough to seem enticing and chewable. The bell is from the one
room school house where my grandmother taught, in Belvedere, IL, three
hours from the farm she grew up on. Three hours from the place where my
mother surely earned her stoicism, three hours from the place where my
mom remembers her own mother talking about being locked in the closet by
her brothers, tortured by her brothers, who my mother never met for
reasons unknown or perhaps totally obvious.
When my grandmother
was dying, she told my mom, "Everyone is terminal, Janey." And to this
day, that is how my mom lives, sure that life will end and grateful for
days of golden, amber, jade, moments of rest amid weeks of toil, looking
up at the sky to predict the days' work.
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