The day was crystal clear, breezy, and filled with insect hum. I stepped forward through tall green stalks into the cornfield and dropped my bucket. My husband's grandparents disappeared in similar fashion into the waving green.
We were collecting young corn for pickling.
I worked my way down and across rows, as the rest of the world vanished into a rushing, ocean noise of green stalks slapping. A blue sky overhead dipped and wheeled. The upper half of the great black barn was still visible; the only landmark in sight.
I thought of all the creepy stories I'd ever heard about cornfields, and began to understand. How easy it would be to lose oneself in the disorienting mass of reaching, touching, slapping appendages. A trickle of blood flowed from my hand where a stalk had sliced it, fine and precise as a paper cut.
Bursting out into the day with my full bucket, I realized I had finished first. I waited in the bed of the pickup for the grandparents as a greedy blackfly made persistent attacks at my head. Not a sound could be heard from the cornfield. It was as if my two companions had been swallowed up.
I watched the huge field sway and riot in the wind, and thought about the world. Isn't this what we're like? Aren't we so distracted by what is immediately surrounding us that we fail to recognize our place in the whole? How often do we become dangerously entangled and lose sight of the larger reality that surrounds us?
My grandparents-in-law broke through the stalks into the clear day. I breathed a sigh of relief.
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