There was a time when m0re of us were more in step with the soil in spring. Though I strive to be a steward of the land, I am not a planter of the land. Oh, what I miss because of that lost connection with the soil.
As a farm boy I watched my parents, our neighbors and my aunts and uncles work the land, plant seeds and wait for the magic of tiny sprouts of corn and oats. There was magic in the soil. Spring after spring.
These good people on small farms turned over the earth with small plows, only two- or three-share bottoms. Then they pulled disks and harrows over the furrows, back and forth, leveling the soil like smoothing a table cloth. The finished surface was a brown carpet ready for the oats drill or corn planter.
It was hard work, on a deadline, compounded by the lack of help since farm kids were still in school. I’d run from the bus to see a field transformed since morning. My dad, too, had changed, now focused on fields, not the milking chores.
A small wagon of seeds for corn, alfalfa and oats waited at the edge of the field while dad rushed to unhook the harrow and hook up the planter, all the time shouting out my duties over the puttering John Deere tractor.
I shuttled between the field and barn, helping dad plant, helping mom with milking the cows. Dad rolled through the fields until dusk. Dust in the dusk, and beyond.
Those farmers knew the land, loved the land, did what was best for the land. They knew when to plant each spring and recorded the dates on a wall in the granary or machine shed.
The fields were small, and sometimes so were the yields in summer and fall. But in the spring the hopes of crops wafted across the bare fields, those hopes and the earthy smell of soil settling into the souls of the stewards of the land.
That’s just the way I remember days on both my Grandparents and Uncle’s farms.
Miss those times.