I kept waiting for rain, but the earth was getting drier. I’d keep the late summer cover crop intact until conditions improved, until the wind came out of the east and rain could turn this tan lot to chocolate. But it didn’t rain — and it hurts to set the disk upon the loose and arid surface.
What do I mean by “hurts”? Surely, the act could not pinch or punch me. The cover crop — oats, rugged but thirsty — are easily flattened; their incorporation gives me no trouble. What hurts is the sound, the sound of drought, the scrape of dehydration: The metal disk squeals when it hits a stone, a stick or some knob of organic matter. The sound says, “This is wrong.”
But we can’t wait anymore — we need to plant the garlic.
We ended tomato season. Generally, the tomatoes end it themselves by dying of disease or getting hit by frost. But they just kept going: lack of rain, spores couldn’t spread, and the temperature stayed so warm that the plants kept setting more fruit.
Late fall tomatoes do not taste like late summer tomatoes. They can look the same, even better, but their depth is gone. They are no longer juicy and multi-textured like before (a thin skin yields to a sweet wall that falls to a flood of sublime juices). Now, they are mealy, mere silhouettes of their former selves.
Enough. But it hurts to destroy something when it is still alive, still giving. Visually, it hurts, because the willing plants are heavy with both green and ripe fruit. The trellis gets cut, and the plants fall slowly. It looks like we are destroying a crop at the beginning of the season and not the end. It looks wasteful, even cruel.
The rotocutter turns the downed rows to colorful, obliterated shards — and this season enters the past.
Most storage vegetables are in: the dry beans, the potatoes, the sweet potatoes. Only the dent corn, the heirloom varieties we grow for whiskey, are left. Since it hasn’t rained appreciably for over two and a half months, it seems incomprehensible that the corn is not yet dry enough to harvest. It stands tall and vulnerable.
I don’t think farmers have ever trusted the weather. We work with it and try to find ingenious ways to work around it, but we know the weather is determinate.
My brother pulls off an ear, pushes back the husk and breaks the cob in half. It’s beautiful, dark red, with large, clean kernels. The sight of this perfection, something he can’t yet harvest, hurts him a little.
He turns the broken center toward him and examines the interior, still spongy, “Damn,” he says, wincing with anticipation.
It hurts not because it pinches or punches, but because it makes us wait, and wait without promises.
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