Harvest time

I finally got my new voice recognition working today! It seems to be going fairly well. I am sending a huge thanks to my mom for helping with this.

The soybeans around here have been replaced by fields shorn so clean that the stubble reminds me of shag rug. The corn is going down now, field by field. Combines bulldoze into forests of corn stalks, which fall down before them and are shredded. Big clouds of dust rise up behind the machines like smoke, and once when my children and I were driving past, we could see that the cloud of dust from a combine was drifting over the road just ahead of us, and it glowed golden in the sun. It looked as though we would be driving to some kind of magic spell. When we finally entered the plume of gold, gritty particles swept into my truck, and when we breathed, it smiled like dry autumn leaves. It reminded me of jumping into leaf piles as a child.

Businesses in the Faribault area sponsor maternal sounding public service announcement on the radio, urging people to get enough rest during harvest, or to be careful and stay safe. They do not do this at other times of year. On Saturday, a combine caught on fire just up the road from us – we could see it from our house. If we had lived here longer, I expect that we would know the whole story, but we know nothing. Our next-door neighbor was out today harvesting, and I scanned his combine for scorch marks but didn't find any.

A radio announcer man with the most delicious, homey Minnesotan way of talking discusses the international grain market on the local station. When he talks about how farmers in South America have been low on rain and plan to start planting soon, it sounds as though he were gossiping about families who live just down the road. As I delight in his turns of phrase, I slowly get an inkling for this scale of the global commodities harvest. I am awed by the enormity of it. In my mind it assumes the sound of machinery roaring and rumbling over swaths of land too large for me even to imagine.