Meeting our fields

About a year has passed now since my husband and I signed the papers to buy our farm. It didn’t have heat or running water at the time because it had been stripped of niceties like pipes and a thermostat, so on our first trip down, we packed everything we needed to dye Easter eggs on the back deck. We also planned to spend some time getting to know the fields.

I had a plan for our first time in the fields. My husband and I were going to waltz there, just like the couple did in the last scene of a movie called Sweet Land. After watching those two people dancing in the wide open space of the movie screen, I sat in a dark theater sobbing as the credits rolled and everyone else got up to leave. Then I broke down crying again in my kitchen in Minneapolis because I felt so wildly homesick for a farm that had never been mine. If I could dance in my own fields, with my husband, I felt like my longing would be put to rest.

My husband knew this was important to me, so he agreed to waltz around in the fields. We went out north of the house, he put his arm around my waist, and we held hands like we were waiting for music to start. From our first step to our last, we were painfully awkward. Our soil is full of clay, and so the ridges of earth between the rows of corn were solid and treacherous. We kept tripping and looking around, trying not to crash through the surprisingly solid walls of last-year’s corn stalks. It was not romantic, and after my husband had checked a couple of times to be sure that I had indeed gotten enough of the long-awaited dancing, we stopped.

With that task out of the way, my husband immediately bent down and started squishing the soil between his fingers, trying to make a snake out of it the way my kids make snakes out of play dough. I bent down to join him and found it was kind of fun. Our soil is so full of clay you could sculpt almost anything you liked from it, and it would hold the shape. I was fascinated, and we crouched there talking about the dirt. Eventually, we stood up again, and just for the heck of it, we started skipping north, each in our own little road hemmed by tough, light brown corn stalks. As I bounced up and down past corn stalks, I looked over at my husband skipping, and I couldn’t help smiling.