Place Getting Smaller

They planted corn in the field outside our back door last month (Numenius did a sketch this afternoon; see left). Every year the crop changes: one year it was tomatoes, another sorghum, another squashes. The land is leased to Campbell’s Soup and they are doing experimental, or seed, growing: the harvest will not make its way into over-salted, over-carageenaned cans per se. Maybe indirectly, but there ends up being a lot of waste. Since this crop, whatever it is, is always heavily (experimentally?) sprayed, we don’t avail ourselves of the bounty.

Corn-maize-as a crop is very imposing; it’s like planting a fast-growing forest. I can no longer see the levee that separates us from Putah Creek as I write this, the levee that would fail to save us if Monticello Dam burst some twenty miles upstream. I like it that Sam and Frodo’s first fright on their journey from the Shire takes place in the overbearing height of a cornfield.

The corn will attract many rodents between now and October; let’s hope the mother of our kittens hasn’t lost her taste for them…