Day 191 ~ My Field of Dreams

July 10, 2014

My Instead: I stood and was present in the soybean field that my grandpa used to farm. 

Just outside of Belleville on the way towards Smithton, I turned onto Park Road on my way back from installing a garbage disposal in one of my son’s apartments. I found myself driving past the field that my grandpa Oscar Merod had farmed for over 50 years. I had taken this route hundreds of times to my house. Today I stopped.

My car and I pulled over and I ran out into the field, almost waist-high in soybeans. I stood. I felt. And then it happened. A plethora of questions populated my head: How many times had Grandpa driven up and down this field on his tractor? What did he think about? Was he so very sad when he had been widowed in his mid-thirties? Was he scared to be left alone to raise two small children? Did he ever have fun? Was he on this very spot when my dad came out to the field on a blazing hot June day to tell him that he was now the grandfather of twins, my brother Mark and me? Did he ever feel forgotten? 

After I pondered Grandpa for a while, my monkey mind jumped to other things. I lay down in the field and felt like a giant in a jungle with all the small creatures buzzing around me. I felt God’s amazing providence over the least of living things…all the hidden wonders that the unbelieving refuse to acknowledge as miracles.  

 

I stood up again in my field of dreams and saw the farmhouse where I was raised for the first two years of my life…my roots. I remembered all the fun my brothers and I had on butchering day with Grandpa and all his buddies. I think this is where I learned to curse! Where I watched as my grandma Merod chopped the heads off chickens. The chicken dance is not just a wedding reception spectacle, let me tell ya! And still when I smell the aroma of a dill plant, I think of Grandma’s garden. Where we covered the kitchen table in newspaper and feasted on watermelon until we were ready to pop. Where we swung on the porch swing to the point that I thought it would detach. These were just some of the memories. They overflowed. 

The breeze blew and unlike the round of applause I received from the golden cornstalks on my country outings in autumn, there was only this eerie silence from the soybean leaves. I listened anyway.