Early Morning on the Farm
Fog shrouds the farm. Horses in the far field are like a mirage - some snow, grizzled gray trees, the frozen snort of a stallion - it doesn't take much to blur. Jane's on her way to the chicken coop. A flake lands on her cheek, a cold, damp, wake-up. The world is in-between. The wind is strangely warm. The coop wire chills. She's sixteen - the child, the woman, more mirages for uncertain vision. Hens scatter at her approach. The rooster rears its comb and crows - wattles flap, brown feathers flutter, the day's first certainty.
A Farmer Dreams
Rain-splitter shares dreams with cool fingered splendor, one vagueness splattering the roof, the other touching his hard skin tender. One moment, he's young enough for the thrums of memory, the woman beside him, shedding years like undergarments. Then he's land, groggy from drought appeased, trickles in cracks, floods in crannies, dust sweetly laid, mud dripping from his thoughts. He's half awake. His wife is snoring. He can't wait to get out on the land again. There's been a shift in pleasure
Life of the Amish Farmer
Humidity overheats and bursts like a boil. Heavy thunder, hail, torrential rain and cooling. The Milky Way drawn by a single farm light dangles out of the black. By day, tobacco bends to the harvest. The corn is holding green. Esther and Daniel are blessed with a new arrival, Lena. The burial service for Lydia Yoder is at 2.00 A.M. We begin with the weather, simple thrumming heartbeat. Then, drawn to the sky, witness our faith awakened by its symbols. The work, of course, is our Gelassenheit, our sweaty submission, a God tutoring to muscle, to heavy footprints in the earth and head bent low. In practical epiphany, the corn fields bind the air we breathe like veins. The child is born, ripens everything. An old woman dies so crops won't have to.
Jenna on the Farm
Her face is still smooth despite the long days in the sun. The skin below her eyes has cracked like land in drought but the cheeks are fine as sand, brown with just a trace of red and the lips are unlined, from years of more doing than talking. Only the eyes say the work was hard and wearying. The back is ironing-board straight and the neck high and proud, but the eyes, once again, a pale and bruised green, speak the language of bending and scouring and digging. Maybe she looked in the mirror one time and it was all too beautiful for what her eyes were telling her. Or maybe it was all like the eyes and the rest had nowhere else to turn but lovely.
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