The bag was always filled to the brim, brown paper with serrated top edges, and waiting on the back seat of the boiling hot car. Holding from the bottom so it wouldn’t break, I lugged it to the screen porch out back. That was older, 11 or 12. When I was younger, 6 or 7, we’d do it together. But now I was bigger and did it myself.
Farmstand: 2 bucks fill the bag as much as you can in bright humid July days. The story goes that before we moved there, my parents went to see the town and find a place to live. On a tour of the area, out in the fields, my mom looked out the car window, pointed to a field and said nice corn’s growing. The person driving glanced over and back to the road & drawled: ma’am, that’s not corn, that’s soy.
It was always one or the other, corn on one side of the country road, soy on the other, corn plowing itself straight up into the sky what seemed like feet from one day to the next. Soy close to the ground, rabbling and rummaging in the soil.
We moved there quickly, just before the semester started, disoriented from my father’s failed bid at tenure, from a Massachusetts village to one slightly bigger, laid out in the Northwest Ordinance of 1789. Out of every six square miles divided up by men back east, one square mile was reserved for education. All the schools were there, colleges, elementary, junior and high packed into that mile. We lived on one edge of the square. You could walk from end to end in 30 minutes. The diagonal way took a little longer. After that, the town stopped and a field of one or the other greeted you: soy or corn.
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The pleasure was in the time passing. One curved leaf at a time stripped from top to bottom. Lovely cornhusks, each delicate, translucent, the parallel capillaries that brought water to feed and grow the kernels striping from point to base. Papyrus imaginings. A second Kroger bag for the empty husks.
And the silk, layers of delicate hairs to be removed, set aside, projects planned for them, drying them on paper towels, tying, braiding them, delusions of weavings. Next day: thrown out.
It took at least an hour for my small hands to peel them all. Hot buzz of summer, a cat or two wandering through, nothing else to do.
Mom always broke them in half, and I’ve still never asked if that was because the pot was too narrow or to give the impression there was double the amount. Now I do the same. Once snapped in half, I’d pull off some end kernels and taste them raw, tiny packets of sweet juice. Now my kids do the same.
Boil for 3 minutes, maximum 5. Into the bowl, onto the plate. Later we got corn holders, tiny corn-shaped spiked-end sticks you’d stick into the ends of the corn to hold it while you spun the cob slathering butter and salt. Felt fancy: two plastic corns to hold the one you were eating.
Methods, of course, contentious and varied. The typewriter, the roundabout, the random. Vanquished cobs piled up.
This was sweet corn, modified and bred from ancient, variegated stalks to look nearly white and taste like sugar. Most of the other corn went for hog feed or oil. Now it goes for biodiesel.
At craft fairs, state parks and summer camps we’d make cornhusk dolls and imagine pioneer life. We believed the stories we were told about the land and how the town came to be there, an agreed-upon miracle of 18th century negotiation where those coming in from the east made fertile fields from rich soil, cleared forests, built towns, squared the landscape and put their names onto straight roads built across the winding paths of creeks.
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In high school we drove out of town and pulled off onto embankments, sharp leaves rising feet above our heads. One night I dared go with friends to await the ghost light. A long long time ago, two young lovers, helpless in their forbidden union, had crashed their car, perishing instantly in that particular cornfield. On the anniversary of the tragedy, if you went out real late and waited long enough, you’d see the ghost lights speeding towards you until right at the last minute they’d fly overhead and disappear. Heart pounding, I waited, others chugging beers and laughing. Lights approached, fast—but only a pickup truck bounced past.
I didn’t get my driver’s license until college for a variety of reasons too boring to mention here. So when I’d come home from college for a visit, I’d drive a lot. There was not much else to do but borrow the family car and drive for hours in the country, past soy and corn and barns and silos. I thought it was beautiful, though there was nothing grand or monumental to see. There were no cell phones, no GPS to guide, just a bunch of regional maps in the glove compartment; accordion-folded rectangles covered in squares.
If you drove west five minutes you were in Indiana where it was another time zone half the year. There, most roads had numbers and not names. All squares, one square of corn and soy after another. I’d turn left, then right, then left, Route 100, Route 50B, State Route 12. I was meant to have the car back in an hour but I was so lost. The squares of corn unfolded for days, I imagined, until they changed to wheat fields in Iowa or Kansas. Panicking, I found a road with a curve and followed it for miles until it connected to a highway. The highway had signs. I was in Kentucky and had to drive back and needless to say I did get in trouble for keeping the car so long.
Another time I took the car for a drive—just 15 minutes, I promise—I followed a dirt road through the cornfields and kept following it into the dappled forest as it got muddier and muddier until I could neither drive forward nor backwards. I had to walk back to the farm where a generous farmer of corn and soy pulled my parents’ car out of the mud with his tractor and chains.
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The cornfields used to have different seed signs at the end of the rows so you could see which variety was growing. Last time I went back all the seeds had the same sign: Monsanto. The last gasp of chance, gene-spliced out, spread around the world, homogenous, utilitarian.
Many years later, when the kids were little, I learned about the three sisters: corn, squash, and beans. Planting them together, as indigenous people always knew, makes the soil richer and each of the plants grow better. Each root system and nutrient transfer feeds the other as one grows and crumbles. Decay of one nourishes the next and the cycle continues. These crops require no pesticides, no fertilizer; they grow with and from each other.
Long straight rows of white sweet corn stream for miles across the land where I was raised. This monoculture makes up part of my own transplanted root system and I transmit this together with my many other knotty, tangled vines.
Today we bought corn, having forgotten that yesterday we also bought corn. The fridge is full. Later, we’ll husk and boil, 3 minutes, 5 max. The plastic corn-holders with spikes to hold are long gone. A thousand miles from Ohio, we’ll slather it with butter and salt, and random-, roundabout-, or typewriter-eat.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. For more about the three sisters: one site for kids, one more detailed, and one very scholarly. And one bit of good news about corn.
As always, you can see my feature documentary BUNKER on Amazon, Mubi, Metrograph, and Projectr.tv.
thank you