Walking The Plowed Land

I just can’t forget those

days when the sun cut paths

through the corn stalks and

fell gingerly on the best

watermelon in the county

The Fourth of July, with home-made ice cream dripping between my bare feet and the hot summer grass practically steaming with each snow white drop that dribbled past my toes. Now those were the days.

The big day for eating home-made ice cream in our family was always the Fourth of July. It seems that it was a big day for my parents. They always made ice cream when they were busy growing up and because that’s just about the only way you could get it, was to make it yourself.

And those days didn’t roll around too often, for they used to have to chase down what money they could find running around and while everything was relatively cheap, it really didn’t matter how cheap it was, because there just wasn’t any money to buy it with.

Now we’ve got the money coming out of our ears, well some of you do anyway.  I’m still doing the begging and borrowing bit and looking for the rainbow’s end. But there is a lot of money floating around and somebody out there noticed it and started jacking up the prices so he could get more than his share, and more and more people are turning to home grown and home made variety of produce.

Even super suburbia where all of American is looking for a home has turned on to the garden grown.  People with just two little rows to plant managed to squeeze squash, tomatoes, and some sort of beans and peas in that mini-acreage.

And from those few handfuls of produce, the city slicker suddenly discovered that it wasn’t just those good looking farm girls that kept some men on the farm, but those home grown victuals that tasted better than Snuffy Smith’s corn squeezens.

My parents were raised on farms and they are presently doing their best to leave the big city behind and head back to that same area of the country where the black-eyed peas taste best and the biscuits rise faster on a cold morning.

They raised me in a small town where I was properly shielded from most of the horrors of life. I thought hard times was being sent to the principal’s office six times in one month.

What little they tried to instill in me about the farmer’s ways I let slip right out of my mind for I was too busy chasing butterflies. The only thing I was very good at growing was watermelons and I hatched up one I’ll never forget right there in our back yard one time.

WATERMELON HEAVEN

It must have weighed close to 50 pounds, of course I’ve probably added poundage to it as the years rolled around.  But is was a nice size one and the biggest I’d ever grown. Each day after school I’d head out there and check on it and drop a little water its way if it was a dry month.

I could tell from the start that it was going to be a biggie. It jumped out of the starting blocks and never slowed down. That melon was my pride and joy and I nursed it along and properly thumped it when it started looking like it might be ripe.

Finally the magic day arrived when my Dad walked out to it, gave it one good solid ripe sounding thump, said, “pull her” and walked off.

But how could he be so sure, why he’d just given it that one little old thump and I’d been thumping it for weeks and months. but I knew he was right and then it dawned on me that I was about to destroy what I had worked so hard to build.

With one quick jerk off the vine, it would be through with its growing. It would be just another watermelon, cooled, sliced and eaten. No longer would I be able to nurse it and encourage it to grow with all the care I’d given any pet.

But I pulled it and we ate it and it was one fine tasting watermelon. But I never really got too interested in growing things again.

Perhaps my hands just weren’t meant to dig deep into the dirt and look for the hidden meanings of how to make plants yield their life-giving products.

I do know that I love the smell of freshly plowed earth.

There probably aren’t too many people left running around this earth, who have followed behind their Dad, as he plowed up the land for the first time in the spring and let the earth breathe life into it.

Well I’ve done it and I dug my bare feet deep into the earth to feel the coolness of the land that has give us so much.

Well, I haven’t even run around barefooted for so many years now that I’ve about forgotten what it’s like and I haven’t had any home-made ice cream slipping cooly down my throat for far too many years.

Everyone tends to forget how good the simple things of life can be when we get caught up in the complexities of trying to be someone, when in the end, we all, eventually, find the earth again.

Hopefully, I’ll get some of that ice cream dripping on my dust-covered toes this holiday.