the electricity went down the grass, then up the pee, and then . . .
Not a mistake made twice.
So, let’s have corn for dinner. July. You go with Mom and cut fifteen ears. That’s three apiece. The ears are medium-smallish, but that means they’re at their best—the kernels like translucent bubbles. You husk the ears, then boil them, and then eat them with butter and salt and hamburgers. The mess of it. The butter rolling down your forearms and pooling around your elbows propped on the oilcloth.
A pitcher of iced tea in the middle of the table. One pickle in an enameled bowl.
Then the nights of the corn harvest. Picking all the ripe ears. Big buckets and bushels and tubs overflowing. The lawn chairs placed in a circle. Piles of husks and silks, dumped onto the compost. It overflows. The stories about our pet hen named June who used to love corn shucking. You would shuck the corn and then hold the bare ear out to her and she would pluck off the little bugs and grubs quicker than quick, then she’d hurry on to the next person’s corn. She was fast, fast, fast. And never once did her sharp beak break a single kernel of corn. That was June the hen, she who was born over the warmth of the pilot light. True, you had given her a bath when you were three, and she had been so sodden with water she couldn’t stand up. “June wet, Momma. June wet.” Mom blow-dried her.
After the husking, we moved inside, as the dark gathered on the lawn. Clean, cook, cut, package, label, and freeze. Corn for a year. Corn and more corn.
A steamy kitchen on a humid night.
Size-wise, the garden was like the house times four. To run a lap around the garden was a taxing event not to be undertaken lightly. It stretched from the horse arena, past the mulberry tree, and down to the fence around the chicken house. A gentle slope. There was the corn, of course, the peas, the tomatoes. Green beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets. Sunflowers, radishes. Broccoli and cauliflower. Lettuce, carrots, and onions. Spinach. Marigolds at the row ends. Gladioli and zinnias. The asparagus bed. Rhubarb. Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries. Cucumbers. Lima beans and squash. Cantaloupes. Other stuff. Experiments. This summer, for example, there were watermelons, and we watched their vines spread out, and the melons started out like marbles lodged inside the blooms but got bigger and darker, and they were thriving and you would walk across the yard after dinner and kneel by the melons and when you picked one up it was still hot from the day. They were small, like cantaloupes, which was somehow disappointing, but when you cut into one it made a crackling, splitting noise and inside it was dark pink and warm and it had a better taste than any normal- or huge-sized watermelon you’d ever eaten, and you asked your parents, why didn’t we grow these before? And the answer was, we don’t know.
You could eat half of one of those melons by yourself and when you were done you had a shell like a cereal bowl and wished that you could actually use it as a cereal bowl or something, but that wouldn’t work. It would shrivel by morning. Which was too bad.
Also, it was too small for a hat.
August. Already?
We gave the terrier a bath that summer. One bath. We filled a big galvanized tub with water, back behind the cellar house. The water was surprisingly cold. And then we found the terrier and picked him up. This in itself was a clear sign that something he didn’t care for was about to happen. We put him in the tub of water and he jumped out. We put him in again and he jumped again. So we held his collar so he couldn’t jump out, and we poured water over him and as his hair got wet he shrank dramatically in size until he looked like a burly rat. He was defeated and shivering and his eyes stared dully ahead and he didn’t try to escape anymore. We soaped him up. Medicated soap, for the ticks. We tried to wash his face without hurting his eyes, and then we rinsed him and rinsed him. When it was done, we released him and ran away. We observed from a distance. In his state of defeat, it took him several moments before he realized he was free, and another few moments to figure out what to do with his freedom. Finally, he put his front paws up onto the edge of the tub, then hopped out and shook. Which was why we had run away.
The horses got multiple baths that summer, because Elizabeth rode them in a lot of horse shows. The horses stood still when she washed them. She hosed them down and then scrubbed and then hosed them again. That was the procedure. Elizabeth did the work—the horses were hers—but it was fun to watch. Or help a little. During the baths, the horses’ bottom lips would go loose and floppy and they would get a dopey look in their eyes, which meant they really enjoyed getting washed. You could smell it in the air whenever one of the horses was getting a bath. It wasn’t a bad smell. Also, there was a certain sound the water made when it was sprayed onto a horse. It almost sounded as if the horses were hollow. Or mostly hollow.
The horse trailer matched the pickup. It was a smart outfit. It was a nice trailer, but it didn’t have any human living quarters in it. Our neighbors who moved away two years ago had a trailer that was half for horses, half for people, but ours just had space for two horses and some equipment. Still, you and Susan figured that the little compartment up front where you could store the tack would make a decent little sleeping compartment for a person. It could really make a pretty darn decent little cubbyhole for a sleeping bag, that’s for sure. Especially for a kid-sized person. We sat in there. We would close the door, but not latch it, and sit in the dark. It was cozy, we thought, and would be a pretty good place to sleep. That’s what we thought.
See Farther
I stood in the kitchen doorway, blinking. I was at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, and Grandma was at the little kitchen table, writing. She didn’t see me. Finally I entered and said good morning. She said good morning and got up and pulled out a chair for me, and I saw there was already a cereal bowl there, plus a spoon and the sugar bowl. At home, I wasn’t allowed to have sugar on my cereal, only honey.
“You must have been one sleepyhead to sleep so long,” Grandma said. She set the milk in front of me. She poured my cereal. She didn’t pour quite as much as I wanted.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It’ll be ten thirty here in a bit.” She poured the milk.
Ten thirty. I’d never slept that late in the history of me. At home, Mom would wake me up by singing a song called “Everybody Up.” It was a song of her own invention.
Maybe it was the way Grandma had put me to sleep that was to blame. The routine was the same as ever. She read an animal story from a farm magazine and tickled my hair. But those stories were for little kids. A dependable raccoon and a troublesome duck. A lesson learned. Then she tucked me in so comprehensively that breathing was an exercise in tightness.
I hadn’t thought that being ten years old would be like this.
I put more sugar on the cereal. “Why didn’t Mom and Dad wake me up to say goodbye?” I asked.
“Oh, they wanted to get off early. They needed to pick up that beef before it got too hot outside.”
Grandma was writing as she talked. She was writing in a little black notebook. A diary? Her hair was almost a perfect globe.
I thought about the beef. We had picked up a whole butchered cow last summer, too—one of Grandpa’s cows—from the meat locker in Windsor. Mom had layered blankets and the sleeping bag in the back of the station wagon, then they stacked all the white paper packets of frozen meat in there and covered them with more blankets. It was a two-hour drive home, and every once in a while, Susan and I had put our hands back under the blankets to feel the cold.
When my cereal was
