This photo is of my father.
I hold it in my hands, a 4-inch by 4-inch Kodak memory of my childhood. The photograph was taken in late autumn, unframed and crisp as the day it was printed. I keep it tacked to the wall in my cluttered office to remind me where I come from and where I will return.
I am not of this desert.
I was not born among the cactus, nor do I believe I will die here. I am from the rich, flat ground that feeds our nation, land of deep rivers and even deeper snow. I am from lakes that are as large as seas and where the sound of freight train whistles breaks the early morning air long before the sun.
Dust clouds pulled forth from the plow hang above the ground in the picture, captured in still eternity. My dad’s face is smiling, sooty grit filling his wrinkles, his teeth forever white against the dirt that coats his skin. The same dirt that, many, many years from now, will cover his body until he, too, goes back to the earth to rise again as green life.
Beside him, the John Deere tractor tires are taller than his six-foot frame, their deep treads packed with clingy field mud laced with broken corn stalks. Later they will leave trails on the gravel road as he drives home to us, the swift spinning tires flinging the thick clay behind him as a literal road map of his life. A map from beginning to end, tracing back through successive seasons with each turn.
He is like this each fall, celebrating summer’s ripe grain merging into autumn’s harvest with a grin that belies his exhaustion. Sixteen-hour days in a tractor is his church, and he is in prayer until the last kernel of grain is stored. His hands permanently smell of thick, blue-black axle grease, more pungent than any incense, his bent fingers held together in penance by broken knuckles and healed scars.
The days are shorter and colder, the morning frost cracking the calluses on his hands and in the evening, his knees creak like the bare branches of the maple trees that stand in the background of the photo. He knows the land as well as he knows his own body, as well as he knows my mother’s body. He knows which fields flood in heavy spring rain and in which acre the family dogs—going back generations—are buried.
Soon it will be winter; you can see it in the sky of the picture, a sort of fading of blue to gray. True winter, when both the soil and my father sleep deep, is still weeks away, when no worm nor ant dare move while the crust of endless snow protects the seeds below. But as the perpetual sun moves through the ether, what is empty and cold will soon be filled with green again.
My father is of this fertile land. As am I.
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(Photo: Jeff/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- Harvest by Ariane Lee - May 4, 2023