The Summer We Walked Forty Acres

“You’d better,” I said.

Nolan did not say much when I told him either. He went out to the shop after supper and came back in with two new pairs of safety glasses still in the package, and a roll of white athletic tape he had bought at the farm store on his way home. He set them on the counter and went to wash up.

We started the next morning at first light. I set my alarm for a quarter past four, made egg sandwiches and filled two jugs with ice water, and woke Jaycee at a quarter to five. She was up on the first try, which she never is.

The sky was just going gray in the east when we pulled up at the end of Merlyn’s field.

By the time we had our sleeves buttoned and our glasses on, it was light enough to see the tassels against the sky, and that is all you need.

If you have never done it, here is how it goes. Seed corn is planted in a pattern. A few rows of the male corn, then a wide band of female rows.

The female rows are the ones you walk, and every plant in them has to lose its tassel before it can shed.

You reach up into the top of the plant, find the tassel, get a grip low on it, and pull it straight up and out.

Clean, so it does not break off and leave a piece. You drop it on the ground. Then the next plant, and the next, all the way down a row that is a quarter mile long.

The machines had already been through and taken most of them. What was left were the short ones the cutter had missed, the ones that had not come up yet, the ones hiding down in the leaves. Those are the ones that get a crew docked.

The dew was the first thing. By the first turn we were soaked to the elbows and down the front of our shirts.

Corn leaves in the morning hold water like a sponge, and every one you push past gives it to you, cold.

You wear long sleeves or the leaves cut your arms raw. Jaycee wore a gray long-sleeved shirt of her dad’s with the cuffs rolled once.

I wore my blue one, a wide sun hat and cotton gloves. She wore a ball cap with her ponytail pulled through the back, and no gloves, because she said she could not feel the tassel through them.

The corn stood over both our heads. In some places it was over seven feet.

You walk down a green hallway with no ceiling but the sky, and you cannot see the person in the next row, only hear her.

“Mom?” Jaycee said, maybe ten minutes in.

“I’m here.”

“Just checking.”

We did that all morning. Every few minutes one of us would say something, and the other would answer, and we would go on. I do not think I have ever talked to my daughter as much as I did that July, and most of it was just “I’m here.”