Harvest Time
Humidity gives way to blue skies covering golden Indiana fields under cloudless October days, eventually surrendering to dust and the drone of corn dryers laboring on the farms.
The no-longer-suffering-farmer has swept his field clean of what she would produce for him, as he demands year after year of her waning fertile ground, plowing over her, never digging too deeply.
Grain dryers whirr the air, eliminating the moisture from the yellow cobs, which, huddled together in massive aluminum silos rise high against the evening sky with the waxing moon.
Somewhere on Belshaw Road she listens to the roar of the farm machinery and tries to avoid winter thoughts, the coming bareness of the fields, stripped of their green and golden jewels, laying in wait for the hard frost.
Blue sky of October gives way to four-shades-of-gray and the promise of bitter wind and acrid smoke along stripped farm fields with naked rows running north and south waiting—waiting for shreds of hope.
Late November the yellow kernels torn from their cobs leave the vacuity of their silver tombs, thrust rudely into daylight to the waiting diesel trucks; taking them far away from their fields of cultivation to be thought of no more.
She hears all this, from somewhere on Belshaw Road, year after year thinking maybe—maybe this should not be heard or witnessed again and that the waxing moon has whispered a secret to her: it is harvest time.
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