Back Home by Chris Hardie
Sometimes the beauty of the fall is as fleeting as the smile of a shy girl.
In the span of a week we went from heavy summerlike rains to freezing temperatures and snow.
The blazing color on the hillsides is turning drab brown. The leaves are dropping and the calendar has turned to November.
There’s a feeling of urgency on the farm when winter seems like it’s just around the corner. It’s time to harvest.
When my parents had a dairy farm, fall harvest made for long days. I would get home from school after sports practice and start milking cows at 6 p.m. while my dad and his hired hand worked on picking corn. By the time the cows were milked, it would be 9 p.m. before we had supper or even later.
In the fall of 1975, a new 70-foot stave silo was constructed on the farm. Its purpose was to hold high moisture corn to feed the dairy cows. I remember coming home from school to see the fresh cement footings and was amazed at how quickly the silo was built.
In those days corn harvest was done with a single-row picker and the cobs were dropped into a gravity box. It was often my job to balance inside the gravity box and push the cobs into the hammer mill, which ground the corn before it was blown into the silo.
It was a slow process compared to today’s large combines. Corn harvest would go on for weeks and the goal was always to have it done before the opening of Wisconsin’s gun deer season in mid-November.
But there were years the weather would not cooperate and some fields were not harvested until December. If deep snows came early, the stalks stood until spring, with little left after deer and other wildlife ate their fill.
The days of the single-row picker are long gone, but on fall days I can still hear in my mind the loud roar of the hammer mill. I can see the fine husks of corn floating through the air like snowflakes. The smell of the freshly-ground corn fills my nostrils, along with the acrid aroma of the propionic acid used as a preservative. It’s the sight, sound and smell of the harvest season.
Someday the silo will probably be torn down because it’s no longer functional or deemed obsolete. If — the good Lord willing — I’m still around, I’ll be curious to look for myself.
But if I’ve been called to my final harvest, someone should check the concrete footing. There you will find the initials “C.H.” scrawled by a young boy’s finger into the wet cement those many harvests ago.
Chris Hardie spent more than 30 years as a reporter, editor
