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<\/a><\/p>\nI\u2019m talking about Lawrence County, Illinois, particularly Lukin Township, but I could just as easily be talking about so much of the Midwest this summer, a summer of sizzling temperatures and dry conditions. I\u2019m talking about the land where the corn crop is in danger; already some farmers have cut fields prematurely, opting to salvage the fired and stunted plants for silage.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m talking about the land of my family, so often a land of loss. My father lost his hands in a corn picker in early November, 1956. After that, my mother lost what was left of her youth. She lost it by crawling under combines to grease fittings, by driving grain trucks to the elevator on sweltering days, by milking cows in freezing weather, by helping my father herd hogs and cattle into pens, by working the substantial vegetable garden all summer long, by putting up quart after quart of tomato juice, green beans, pickles, corn. My mother lost her youth by being who she was, a farm wife who so often had to be the hands her husband lacked. I never heard her utter a single word of complaint. There were many lessons my parents tried to teach me that wouldn\u2019t set root until I was older, but the one thing I always knew from them was this: when your life is hard and when it doesn\u2019t seem that you can get through it, all you can do is put your head down and push. All you can do is keep going.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been years since I\u2019ve lived on the eighty acres my father owned in Lukin Township, but my muscle memory still retains the strain of working that land: the weight of hay bales, brought to the knee and bucked up to stack on the wagon or in the mow; the heat of the tractor exhaust blowing into my face as I made pass after pass, plowing or disking a field; the blisters on my palms from walking the beans and swinging a hoe to cut down jimpson weed and poke berry; the stumble of my steps over the hard clay clods.\u00a0 I remember afternoons when clouds gathered over the fields and the air smelled like rain, and my father finally said, \u201cC\u2019mon.\u201d He drove the tractor into the machine shed. I parked the truck in the farmyard and made sure the windows were up. We met on the front porch of the house, and my father told me to fetch us Pepsi-Colas. We sat in folding lawn chairs and drank, watching the rain come across the fields, moving up our lane, until finally it was upon us and we had to scoot our chairs a little farther back on the porch. I remember how the rain dripped from the leaves of the giant oak in our front yard. The wind came up and the air cooled, and we had nothing to do but to sit and watch as the rain kept falling. I remember the ecstasy of it. I remember the release from labor. I remember my father saying, \u201cJust look at it come down.\u201d And that\u2019s what we did; we sat there and watched it rain.<\/p>\n
May it come soon now for the sake of all those farmers in the Midwest. May it come soon for all our sakes, those of us dependent on those farmers and the vagaries of weather for much of our food and the ethanol in the gasoline we buy. When the crops fail, the prices we pay in the grocery and at the pump go up. It\u2019s as simple as that, but so many people don\u2019t stop to think about how their lives are connected to what\u2019s going on in the land of my family, the land where my father worked until his heart gave out, the land where so many others to this day keep pushing their bodies against the odds. There\u2019s a lesson here for those who write, and the lesson is this: you\u2019ve failed before you ever put pen to paper or keystroke to computer if you think there are people in this world whose lives don\u2019t matter. Look at this picture of one of the doors on my father\u2019s old pickup truck left behind for over sixty years on the eighty acres that another man now owns:<\/p>\n