Simple Joy

Let me tell you a story about this picture. This is our pasture on the East side of our house, probably early Spring before the warm, dry weather turned the grass to a golden brown. It doesn't look anything like this now. Our little neighborhood stayed pretty static for the many years I have lived here, until the early 1970's when a real estate developer purchased the property and filled this little gully with landfill. We have houses looking down on us now.

This was always a beautiful time of year. Just out of the camera shot were two Weeping Willows that budded out and made a canopy that covered an area as big as a house, it's branches reaching the ground until the cows trimmed them up. In the hot summer months, that is where I liked to hang out because it was always about 10 degrees cooler.

The cows or horses, whichever we had at the time were always kept off the pasture all winter and my dad waited until the ground was dry enough that their hooves wouldn't dig up the earth. That first day we turned livestock loose to eat the fresh green pasture in the Spring was always a pleasure to watch. They would run out there, often kicking their hind legs, their joy so obvious having such wonderful stuff to graze and room to roam.

Do you see the bottom between the two hills? It looks a little flat there. That was where my dad decided to grow his own grain for the cows. He had it fenced off, using an electric wire around the parimeter to discourage anyone from pushing down the fence. The animals had a healthy respect for it and kept their distance. He grew "Indian corn," the multcolored ears you often see in the grocery stores to use as decoration at Thanks Giving. We never tried eating this variety ourselves; my dad said it wasn't very good. But the cows loved it. He also grew sweet corn for us. He and Mom stripped the cobs of the kernals and froze it. There is nothing quite like corn fresh picked and dropped immediately into boiling water!

At that planting time, I asked my dad if the popcorn we bought from the store would grow. Dad said that he thought it had been treated and probably wouldn't, but he let me try. I got to plant two rows of popcorn all along the whole length of that patch of dirt. The corn grew strong and healthy. The stalks were about half the height of the sweet corn but otherwise looked identical.

So at harvest time, we had three varieties of corn and we had to husk it all. My sister, me, Mom and Dad sat out in the back yard rubbing two ears of corn together that had been dried out in the sun; the Indian corn going into a barrel and the popcorn going into mason jars. Mom took care of the sweet corn, loading it up into the freezer in small bags. My fingers got so sore and it seemed to take forever to get everything de-cobed. I'd come home from school and be sent out back to rub ears of corn together, especially "my" popcorn. You can imagine how many stalks of corn covered those two rows and how many ears each one produced! I think we had the last bowl of popcorn from that harvest about 10 years later!

Then I remember after the all the corn was harvested, Dad took down the electric wire and part of the fence and let the cows in to eat the stalks. There was that joy again in these animals at the bounty they were given. And as I remember that simple joy that could also be taken as thanks, I wonder where my simple joy and appreciation of simple things has gone. It's good to think back and be reminded once in awhile.