Combines dance, hand to shoulder, waltzing with grain carts big as houses through fields, their song like water pouring. They hand their grain to semis to haul to bins that rise like cities over the fields. I watched these trucks rush past our house, park, then whirl back the way they came. At night when farmers’ lights splatter fields I think of mystery, but soon those disappear, leaving pools of darkness with a smattering of dooryard lights.
After harvest, giant floaters and limestone trucks pour fertilizer into the ground, readying it, with hope. Then the tractors knife stubble back to the dirt, laying in the fertilizer, and opening the soil for moisture to sink deep.
We’ve entered the season of waiting and rest. Darkness continues to fatten, but only for a few weeks. Then slowly the sun will top the horizon sooner, lay down later. But the cold will wrap itself around our hands and thighs, the trees and bushes, squirrels and birds. It will slap our faces. The ground will rest, growing hard, walled against our footsteps and plows.
Sometimes winter calls us to a stillness that doesn’t push dreams to come true, that doesn’t speak. Even walls like that hard ground, as painful and lonely as they can be, can wrap around us like a chrysalis that cradles our melting selves so we can awake up as a new creation, just like the ground awakens, seeds throwing over clods of dirt, plants like hands lifted in thanks for the sun and rain.
I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.
