The Corn We Sold Off Our Own Tailgate
What The Summer Cost
You have to understand what that summer had been, to understand why I stood in my own driveway shaking over a feed store receipt.
Grandma Dean had the stand because she had the field and the frontage. A half acre of Bodacious and Ambrosia she put in every May, right along the road where the traffic was thickest coming off the highway.
What she did not have anymore, at seventy one, was the back to bend over a wagon of corn for six hours in the July heat. She had told me so herself, rubbing at her hip.
So in May she had looked at my two across her kitchen table and said, like it was a gift she was handing down, that they could run her stand all summer and keep every dollar they took in.
Her corn, her sign, her cash box. Their hours and their legs and their manners.
We shook on it over iced tea, the four of us, and I remember thinking what a fine thing this was. The kids would learn to work and love on their grandmother both, in the same summer.
And they worked. Lord, they worked.
Caleb set an alarm for five so he and his daddy could pick in the cool while the ears were still sweet.
Jeff had told them the truth of it. The sugar in sweet corn starts turning to starch the minute the sun gets on it, he said, and the only honest ear is a morning ear.
So they picked by headlamp and dew, filling the wagon, and had the table set up by seven when the first commuters came through.
Hannah ran the cash box. She made the change and counted it back into every hand and said thank you to every single car that pulled off.
She was so small that first summer she had to stand on an upturned five gallon bucket to see over the folding table, and people drove back out of their way just to buy corn from a little girl on a bucket.
They sat out there in the gnats and the heat from seven to one, six days a week.
When a thunderhead came up over the Maquoketa they threw a tarp over the crates and climbed in the truck cab and watched the rain come across the beans. The second it quit they were back out wiping down the table with a rag.
Caleb kept a tally on a notepad, dozens sold, so Grandma would always come out right. He was proud of that notepad. He showed it to her every Saturday and she would look it over and nod.
I brought them sandwiches at eleven. I saw it. This is not a thing somebody told me about.