Corn Creek

There’s eleven of us in the covered shed, ages three to seventy-two. Most are thirteen, shucking purple corn so dark it’s almost black. There is a hint of winter in the air, and the ears, harvested three years ago then stored in barrels, are as dry and gold as autumn’s leaves.

As they pass through our hands, the blonde husks nick and scratch in contrast with the color and texture of an exquisitely smooth and royal purple below. That thin, almost metallic smell of frost on the wind. We’ve been here before.

We were here when the cottonwoods, narrow and golden, littered the surface of the creek – so full, so abundant, that one might have mistaken the thin creek for dry land. We did step in, an accident, a boot soggy and uncertain, a paused and upturned turned face rich with the always-question of life: How? Why?

Reach down and part those yellow leaves. Look! Water, cold and seeping with winter’s lifeblood soaking into the soil. Dry those feet. Move those toes. The yellow leaves, soggy and crisp like the first of winter’s flakes taken from a bowl of cereal. Pebbles in the creek, black and purple, corn in our hands.

Colors. Textures. Memories. Looking up, I spy two of the kids sitting in a broken cart, pretending to drive somewhere magical. They’re talking about Texas. They’re talking about clouds. The three-year-old takes the wheel and steers through a sky so pale with winter’s wings that gray and brown become blue and almost pink.

Do you feel the curl of leaves as they wrap around your imagination? Are there places in you where skin smarts after the brittle edges of autumn slice tiny slivers of crimson into your hand? As if the pain of life was its own joy? Or the tearful reunion of winter was its own spring?

“You know Joe,” Ron, our farmer and friend of life, sidles up next to me, “I love these moments.” Like me, he’s watching the kids in their diverse tasks and ways. Been watching for years.

“Me too, Ron... Me too.”

It’s not meant to be consistent, or singularly focused. Life, I mean. The narrative of the moment. Two of the kids are working the sheller, an antique hand-cranked machine now rigged to a pleasingly 80’s style stationary bike. They used to tease each other. They still do, but there’s a whiff of respect that comes after years of shared growth rings. I glance, with upturned face, one soggy boot, and wonder – How? Why?

No answer.

Another child, now a young woman, pours the shelled corn into the cleaner. Rumble, rumble, vibrate and fan, the kernels tumble through a series of screens that separate the dense seeds from the bits of chaff, and pfff, sends the dry fluff flying. These are children. These are colors. I hear things.

What is it we teach? What is it we pass on? Surely, it’s subjects and math formulae, but there’s a brittle gold in our days that has a sound when we touch it. Kshhh. It’s more than a skill and the peddling of a bicycle. It’s more than the history of Connecticut. It’s the intangible sweetness of caring, that sharp tang of winter that makes kindling so bright. Warmth. A flash in the eye.

It’s not possible for me to predict this. The how and why. It’s not even reasonable to expect, because life smarts too. I have only upturned expressions, a child’s face become my own, a question. No answer. Do the words of my heart matter when cold is seeping into the sole of my foot? What is the imprint of a child’s education, the footprint, the handprint? Why does the color of the sky matter, bleeding like translucent panes over seasons of corn and memories?

Is it reverie? Is it nonsense? I think it has a shape.

A small bird alights out the window, brushing aside a patch of snow from a bare branch, gray on gray on gray. The angle of my eye, the glossy blank face, the years of being in the same place and time. Why do folded memories becomes so pleasant to unwrap? What makes them sour?

Bring children fondness for their own ways of hearing.