I asked two of my sweet loves to help me with dinner tonight. Their job- to shuck the corn. 

On the way to the sitter this morning, C asked me if we could have corn on the cob sometime soon, so this evening on the way home I stopped by the store to get some. Nothing beats pulling it right out of your own garden or stopping at a roadside stand, but in lieu of those, Giant would have to do.

When I was a kid and we had that gigantic garden, my mother would grow corn. My sister and I had the job of shucking it. We would sit on the the edge of our well off the back porch and strip away the layers of leaves and fine threads to get to the ear of corn inside. We didn’t use pesticides or anything of the sort on our garden, so inevitably, there were ears of corn that had gotten overrun with worms. We would pull back the leaves and our hands would feel something squishy. Naturally we would scream and throw the corn across the patio. My mother would come out, finish shucking that ear of corn, remove the bug, and salvage what she could of the corn itself. The bugs never bothered her.

Our house was on the edge of a massive cornfield. The corn wasn’t grown for human consumption, so it wasn’t harvested when it was fresh. The corn plants would grow throughout the summer, and the hot August sun would begin drying out the stalks. We would disappear into those corn rows, inventing games, and spinning around trying to get ourselves lost. We would race through the rows, weaving in and out of the lanes, trying to beat each other to the edge of the field. At night, we would shine our flashlights across it and imagine what creatures lurked within.

It wasn’t until fall, after the field had turned brown and the plants were all dried up, that the harvester would show up, and over the course of a few days, would gather and separate all the ears of corn. When it was gone, the field looked like a waste land, smashed and broken corn plants covering the ground.

My sister and I would scavenge the field for any ears of corn the harvester might have missed. Most of the time we would find ears with a a few rows of kernels still attached, but every once in awhile we would find untouched ears, a veritable jackpot for us kids. When we had gathered our corn we would remove all the kernels. This was  a tough job, as the kernels had hardened (think uncooked popcorn) and we used our hands to remove them. I remember the palms of my hands turning red and my fingers getting sore from the exertion.

I’m not sure if this was a fruitless exercise, or if my mother actually used the corn for something. It seems to me that perhaps she used it as bird feed, but that is a complete guess. Maybe in the end it was just a chore to keep us quiet. Either way, I remember it quite vividly. During the rotating years, the farmer planted soybeans instead of corn to help the land heal and in those years the field was off limits to us.

I drove past that house not that long ago. The field is partly gone, taken over by houses and perfectly manicured lawns. It seems a poor return but time marches on. At least in my memory, that field still remains ever ready for our imaginations.