The Winter We Picked Our Own Heat

The bags

The corn in those rings was still about eighteen percent moisture. A corn stove wants fifteen or under, or it smokes and clinkers and fights you.

That corn needed a couple weeks of wind through the fence before I could burn it.

So in the meantime I bought bagged stove corn at the feed store, fifty-pound bags at nine dollars and forty cents each.

Six bags that first week. I did the math on the truck seat in the parking lot and then I made myself stop doing it.

Every morning before work I scooped the clinker out of the burn pot and filled the hopper.

Every evening the kids came in from the field, peeled off their layers by the stove, and stood with their backs to it, and nobody complained about anything.

We kept the back bedroom shut. We ate supper in our sweatshirts.

Maisy wore her stocking cap to the table, and I let her, because the house was cold enough that I would have worn mine too if I’d thought of it.

The work

I want to tell you honestly how hard it was, because I think people forget. A strong man in his prime, picking by hand, could husk forty or fifty bushels in a long day.

Grandpa said his own father could do a hundred, but Grandpa told a lot of stories.

I am not a strong man in my prime. I am a thirty-six-year-old hospital aide who lifts patients for a living, and my back already had opinions before any of this.

On a good evening I picked maybe twelve bushels before the light quit.

Asa picked about eight. Maisy picked two or three, and she was proud of every ear.

Some evenings we came in with twenty-five bushels, some with fifteen. You could not hurry it. You could only keep showing up.

The first Saturday, Halloween, we were in the row at seven with frost on the husks. We picked straight through till four.

Edna from the next farm over, who is eighty-one, walked down the field lane at noon with a basket.

She had ham sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and a jar of hot cocoa for the kids, and she did not ask one question.

She sat on the tailgate while we ate and told Maisy about the year she picked corn with her own grandmother in 1952.

“We used a peg just like that,” she said, touching Maisy’s hand. “My grandma’s was bone. Yours is better.”

That Saturday we brought in close to seventy bushels. At four I sent the kids in to wash up, and they went to the church trunk-or-treat in the parking lot, Asa claiming he was too old for it and going anyway, Maisy dressed as a farmer, with the peg in her coat pocket.

The sheller

Every afternoon when we came in, before supper, we shelled at the back step. You cannot burn ear corn in a corn stove.

It has to be kernels, clean, so the auger can feed it into the burn pot.

Grandpa’s sheller would do a bushel in a bit under ten minutes if you kept it fed and cranked steady.

That does not sound like much until you have cranked for half an hour and your arm turns to rope.

Asa took the crank. Maisy fed the ears. I held the bucket and dumped it into the bin in the stove shed.

The cobs piled up beside the step, and we saved them for kindling in the fire pit.

Asa cranked until his arm shook, and he never once said a word about it.

One evening I looked at him with his hood up, working that old iron wheel around and around in the low sun, and I saw my grandfather so clearly it scared me.