I Am a Daughter of These Fields
These are my flat, midwestern fields; fields of corn and wheat and beans, spread out evenly across the states, stretching forever upon forever. I have grown accustomed to craving the mass of ocean water and the soft, creeping beachsand beneath my toes, as well as the cool, dry air of the southwest, where mountains and mesas rise over rolling, red land....But deep within me, I know home has settled in my bones when I see this boring, midwestern land, as thin as a slip of paper beneath an enormous, wide, blue sky.
As a young girl, I tied my long, blonde hair back in pony tail and hopped on my pale pink ten speed, pumping and pushing the pedals as fast I could, headed for the fields. I wound through my little neighborhood and up to the middle school where the cornfields started out by the baseball diamonds. Past the second diamond, all the way back where the school had installed a boring, brick red wooden work-out center, a path formed out through the cornfield, leading walkers and bikers to Dallas Road. Dallas led cars out of the city to highway 24, which ran alongside the cornfields the length of the city. Dallas Rd was also the street that my best friend, April lived on, and the bumpy dirt path through the field by the baseball diamonds connected our neighborhoods. Once I rode through the field, it was just a short ride down the length of Dallas Rd to April's house. Only a few houses dotted the sides of the street, and the rest was lined with thousands of cornstalks. As the summer wore on, those cornstalks grew higher and higher, until they were twice my height and hid the setting sun on my rides back home.
Years later, I found my high school boyfriend and I out driving on the country roads that cut the cornfields into little squares. They were wide, open fields, with only a few houses scattered around. At night, we'd take his big truck and go park in a field where a farmer left a path and climb out onto the hood and watch the night sky move slowly above us. Cars rarely drove by or bothered us, so the field became ours. It silently listened to us talk and watched us kiss until the night breeze cooled our toes and bit at our noses.
Even when I went away to college, I stayed within four hours of home, providing me with countless hours over the years of driving through the Indiana and Illinois country. Sometimes I'd drive back to school with a camera in my front seat so I could stop and take pictures of little cemetaries and chapels stranded in the middle of open fields. I particularly liked the late summer and early fall when the fields were high and the trees were full. The farmhouses came alive and the cattle and horses mingled alongside the road. I'd drive along in my car, fantasizing about living in my own farmhouse someday, raising children and working, surrounded by rows of corn and wheat. There is nothing that brings me alive like the sight of a harvest moon floating over the land or the smell of the fields in the summer and autumn, as they give birth to crops and then shed them. The fields live within a natural rhythm, a cycle that pulls my teeth and bones to match, bearing and giving what I am and what I have and then resting through the dead winter, reviving myself. I am the daughter of these fields.
