Gleaning corn….

 

I love driving thru the country in the fall, seeing the newly harvested fields, the rolling countryside, and the woods showing their glorious fall colors before dropping their browned and withered leaves for winter. 

As I was looking at the cornfields today , reduced to stubbles by the pickers, I remembered gleaning corn in the fields as a child.

It was something I did with my family, after the corn had been harvested, because in those days the two row corn pickers weren’t efficient like the sixteen row corn pickers they have today, the air-conditioned enormous contraptions that suck up every single ear of corn and reduce the stalks to nubbins.  When I was a child, the stalks were left in the field, bent over, but intact, and the pickers left a lot of corn behind.  My Grandfather picked his corn with two work horses, Bill and Joe, tethered to a picker that they pulled behind them.

Mother worked at the local drugstore through the week, but on Saturday mornings  we would drive to my Grandmother’s house in the country, and I, along with Mother and usually my Aunt Idalene, would walk thru the fields, especially the popcorn fields, as popcorn was a lucrative crop  in the bottom farmland of Southern Illinois in the fifties, and glean the leftover corn.

We would trudge along between the cornrows, me listening to the older women talk,  dragging gunny sacks that we filled with corn, it would often be cold, usually muddy, and it was hard work as the wet ears of corn became increasingly heavy as we filled the sacks.

Later, we would shell some of the corn, leaving the rest on the ears to dry, sitting around my Aunt’s pot bellied stove, and then she would pop bowls of the still damp corn.  The undried kernels wouldn’t pop open, but they would swell, sometimes partially bursting,  and become very chewy.  Oh, they were wonderful, a taste that is hard to describe, and something that most of you have probably never had the opportunity to eat.

It was hard work,  a fall ritual that farm women in our family had done for generations, glean the corn.  We just accepted the labor and enjoyed the reward.  It was a simple time…