Hidden Blessings
photography by Talitha Schroeder & text by Donna Hecker
We’d waited months for the call. Jennifer Gleason’s Hickory King corn was about to be harvested on the Amish farm where it was grown, and she had permission for us to watch and record the mule-powered process.
When the call finally came, in an after-hours email not seen until the next day, we grabbed our keys and a camera and took off down the road. Arriving at the farm an hour later, we found something we didn’t know we were looking for.
The farmer whose work we’d come to observe was down in the trenches, repairing a broken drain; his mules were back in the barn; and the harvest was on pause, at least for the day.
Still, he sent us out to the cornfield where he’d been working earlier, and suggested we climb up on the wagon to get a look at the morning’s haul.
We’d been to farms before but this one was different. A con trail overhead was as incongruous as our air-conditioned station wagon. Towering stalks of corn rustled beside a packed dirt road, the two fat ears on each one still tightly swaddled in their husks.
We saw the partially harvested patch, one of many that stretched out before us along that curving road, banded by green fields and mirrored in a pool of shimmering water.
We saw the mules’ hoofprints, still visible in the dirt beside the ropes used to hitch them to the corn picker, itself hitched to a faded blue wagon. And we saw the corn picked before we arrived, not yet stripped from the cob, and the entire morning’s harvest barely filling the wagon half full.
What we didn’t see were the hands that had saved the seeds, prepped the fields, planted the kernels, tended the growing stalks, or cared for the mules and machinery which harvested the mature ears.
We also didn’t see the hands that would take the stripped kernels of corn to Sunflower Sundries, where they would be boiled and soaked and hulled and rinsed until transformed into the long-lasting staple called hominy. Or dried and ground into hominy grits.
Nor had we (yet) seen the hands that would simmer the hominy with broth and herbs and aromatics, or the hands that would carry steaming bowls of it to our table.
But nothing in the process was diminished by the absence of our eyes upon it. The work was no less valuable for being unseen.
As the old way of saying grace goes, “bless us o lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive through thy bounty.” And blessed we truly are.
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