crops

I picked tomatoes yesterday and corn today. Tons. Today also I sorted out the tomatoes. It is exhausting to pick corn. The bucket is five gallons. You walk in a row. Today there was mud because it was also raining. You pick corn from both sides and someone else is two rows over on either side of you picking from those rows. I am not fast yet. But that's okay I think.

Sorting is easy. Remember those waxed cardboard "chicken boxes" we used to have? we have those. I stack the tomatoes two deep in the chicken boxes, and ended up with about fifteen. Including some boxes that were tomatoes for canning. The spotty ones are canning tomatoes. I had more oranges than really red ripe ones. I can't imagine how boring this is for anyone to read.

The pain in ones back while picking corn and lugging a full five gallon bucket of corn through sticky mud in sneakers is unreal. Also squatting, bending, lugging the buckets of tomatoes... off the charts. I should have been training for this, I was thinking. Also I was thinking maybe I'll crawl for a while, maybe nobody will notice I'm crawling to find the ripe tomatoes.

The sky was amazing yesterday and totally rained on us today. I got there on time, 20 to six. In the pouring rain. I got soaked in the field. The amusement slash terror of being followed in a field of corn by a gigantic tractor while he waited for us to dump our buckets of corn in the gigantic shovel part of the tractor relieved part of the pain. Then when we filled the tractor bucket, he would drive off to put it in the big flatbed trailer hitched to the truck. I can't believe how much corn we picked. We picked a trailer and the back of a pickup truck full of corn, and I sorted all the tomatoes between 5:50 and 10:50 AM. I liked it though. It made me smile. And I can't help but think farm work is the cure for insomnia and depression. I worked my ass off and I wasn't even hungry.

Then I came home and collapsed on the couch. Then the Jehovas Witness ladies knocked on the door just as soon as the cat had gotten comfortable under my blanket. And I thought it was the neighbor's little boy. I should have played dead.

So today a while ago I bought a rain coat. And boots.