The Corn’s as Low as an Ant’s Elbow

The Corn’s as Low as an Ant’s Elbow

Blame it on Easter.

This year, I didn’t think about having the ground tilled for my garden until after the Bunny dropped off the children’s baskets. That put my seeds and transplants in the ground at the same time the rain dried up and the temperatures began to soar.

With the sun beating down, many of my transplants became as beetles torched by a malicious child wielding a magnifying glass. Those fledging baby vegetables vaporized into unrecognizable clumps of dust. Entire seeded sections of beans, sunflowers and peas thought it best to live their entire lives underground – undisturbed.

A picture of my corn taken today. Looking like corn should.

In spite of the harsh climate and with a little sprinkling from the hose, my corn thrived. Well, the weeds and the corn thrived. Stalks growing tall and straight, lean and gawky dependable and eager as Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – until the rains. After months of drought, the precipitation came in violent bursts of wind, water and electricity.

After the first storm, the next morning I stepped outside to see my corn looking as if Mrs. Jolly Green Giant had taken a large iron to press down her husband’s leafy toga.

I sent a frantic text to Kim Sitzmann whose husband Dennis grew up in an Iowa corn field. She said to leave it alone and the sun should pull it back up. I had a hard time believing that. I tell my children to straighten their rooms before I return home. It could happen – if the laws of Physics changed.

Neither the sun or the corn cooperated. Every time I peeked through my curtains there lay snoozing corn.

Well, if they weren’t standing up on their own power, I was going to trek out there like a good mother and find some backbone for them. For the next hour, I pulled the stalks vertical, bent down, dug and mounded dirt around each fallen plant. It was exhausting but that’s what farmers do who love their corn. For days my nails were a nice shade of burnt umber. But I was pleased.

Then came last Saturday night and more large dollops of bright red splattered on the radar. Another mammoth storm. The next morning my corn lay as flat as the chest of Mary Sue Applewhite. (A fifth grade friend who in spite of faithfully performing bust enhancing exercises daily never increased a millimeter over 28 AAA by school year’s end.)

My corn last week. You see my cause for concern.

This time I waited on the Lord. After those horrific storms last April, God didn’t get down on bended knee and right those uprooted oaks. He didn’t scrape up dirt and pile it around their 200-year-old trunks. He didn’t walk around the next 48 hours with orange fingers. No. I don’t know exactly why he didn’t but I’d like to think the being who created the universe in six days had more sense than that.

Who props up corn after every storm? Persons who have already plucked every weed, harvested every squash and shelled every pea.

So I had my friend Annie Ruth say a prayer and I washed my hands of worrying on the subject. For like Mother always said, in life it’s always best to trust God and arrive at the manicurist with clean fingernails.