A Letter from Iowa:  Harvest Home

Read at the Deep River Congregational Church
By the Rev. Timothy Haut
November 20, 2011

Dear Timothy,

Life goes on in Blue Grass as another Thanksgiving shines on the horizon.   Thanksgiving may be my favorite holiday, Timothy.  There is no frantic buildup for months in advance, no time bomb of a shopping season, no advertising assault that beats you over the head until you just want it to be over.    It’s just this simple time to be with people you love, to make the cranberry relish and pumpkin pie and to say prayers of gratitude as the house fills up with the perfume of roasted turkey all around you.  And I think that at this golden moment of the year, time itself pauses as we remember the sweet aroma of other years and other loves.
 
Yesterday Harley Jacobsen and the other guys from the Highway Department were over at the town water tower, deciding who would get to climb up there and putup the electric Christmas star, the one that used to hang in the window of the Lone Star Truck Stop Café on Route 61.  For the last 15 years or so, our mayor, Orville Taylor, flips the switch the day after Thanksgiving so that everyone passing through town can see it blinking off and on up on the water tower and know that we are in the heart of the holiday season.   It’s become a town tradition, and almost everybody looks forward to seeing it.  It’s just getting it up there that’s a challenge.  

Harley, being the youngest one on the town crew, has always gotten stuck with the job even though he is afraid of heights.  Sweaty hands are a challenge when you’re climbing up the metal ladder with an electric star and extension cord tucked under your arm.   Last year he popped the front button on his pants about halfway up the ladder, and we nearly had a catastrophe on our hands as we watched the star rising and the denim falling.  This year he wore his overalls, and things were going fine until an enormous flock of starlings began to cackle at him from the tops of the big oak trees in the square.    For some reason those birds seem to gather into enormous flocks this time of year, moving from one farm to another, gleaning whatever leftover corn may be out there in the ruts of the harvested fields.     Ruby McCullough told me that they call it a ‘murmuration’ when thousands of starlings take to the air, swooping and diving in great drifts and waves, never crashing or colliding, almost as if they are guided by a silent voice giving directions.   And that’s what seemed to be happening up there--with Harley and the star right in the middle of them.  

“The horn, the horn,” he hollered, pointing at the town pickup truck, maybe thinking that a little noise would scare this mass of blackbirds away.   Ray-Gene Wurley, standing in the grass in open-mouthed amazement at the sight above him, didn’t quite understand Harley’s orders.   He thought he was yelling “Corn, Corn,” referring to the 50-pound sack of cracked feed corn in the back of the truck that he was planning to take home to feed his chickens, and he ripped open the bag and flung the corn in the grass for the starlings.    It did have the desired effect, however, and quickly the starlings turned their attention away from Harley up on the tower to the feast prepared for them down below.

Your Uncle Arnold and I love to watch the birds, and we manage to set out a pretty good Thanksgiving feast for them just about every day.   Arnold stopped milking cows a long time ago, but he’s never got out of the routine of getting up early every morning, when it’s still dark and the world is still as quiet as starlight.  He pulls on his jacket and John Deere hat and fills the feeder by the kitchen window and the one over by the garage, and sometimes he’ll take a walk down the street to watch the world wake up.   Usually he’s back with a newspaper under this arm  by the time I’ve perked the coffee and fed the cat.   But a couple of days ago he wasn’t, and that always makes me nervous.   I can conjure up images of him collapsing from a heart attack with nobody around to notice, or getting run over by some fool that’s putting on their eye makeup or combing their hair while they’re driving to work.   There was a time when I could imagine worse things, like Arnold carrying on a secret, romantic rendezvous with some waitress at the White Way Café, but Arnold’s now at the stage where he’s more interested in the cinnamon donut than the one that puts it down in front of him. 

So when the coffee was ready and the sun was slanting through the kitchen window and Arnold wasn’t around, I felt uneasy, and I got uneasier by the minute.  I circled the house, peering out all of the windows thinking that maybe he was in the yard raking up a few leftover leaves, or standing by the curb yakking with Harold McCullough or Charlie Hildebrandt about the bad year the Iowa Hawkeyes football team is having or the motley crop of Presidential candidates who are likely to drive through Blue Grass in the next few months.  But he didn’t seem to be anywhere around, so I made up my mind to pull on my own jacket and find him.  

I had gotten myself pretty worked up and was prepared to let him have it with a double dose of my temper if I found him and he wasn’t dead, but when I spotted him on a bench in the side yard of the Blessed Assumption Church, it was only relief that filled my heart.  He was sitting there with his eyes closed and his cap in his lap, his crop of white hair shining in the morning sun.  Somehow he knew it was me, and without even opening his eyes he smiled and patted the bench seat next to him.   I bit my tongue and sat down, and I was glad I did as he took my old wrinkled hand in his.  It was a golden morning, and warm for November, and the lightest brush of frost was already gone in the morning sunshine.   And all around us under the great arms of this old maple tree was a golden carpet of huge leaves.   This tree had seemed to hold onto its leaves longer than almost any other, as if autumn was a time to hold on to as long as possible, a season to linger and savor slowly.   It was like Arnold and me, I thought, near the tail end of our own autumn.   So we sat there in between the gold on the earth and the gold of the sun rising in the November blue, and the sunlight reflected up from the earth surrounding us in a sphere of golden light.  For this one moment, Timothy, I will give my thanks as we gather together to praise God on this sweet holiday.

A little later we walked back home without speaking.  It wasn’t one of those difficult silences, the kind that is almost too heavy to bear, where you think of a hundred things you wish you could say but know that if you do you may inflict some hurt that you won’t be able to undo when the normal noise of life returns.   This was the kind of quiet where nothing needed to be said for a little while,  as if everything that needed to be said had already been covered in a conversation that had lasted a lifetime.   I found myself humming, thinking of the words to the old Thanksgiving hymn, “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come.”    I was thankful for this lifetime, the one with Arnold, raising our children and watching our grandchildren grow up, too.   But I haven’t always been thankful enough, and maybe that‘s always been on my mind.  There’s a part of that hymn that says,
All the world is God's own field,
Fruit unto His praise to yield;
Wheat and tares together sown
Unto joy or sorrow grown.

That wheat and tares are the good things and the bad things that come together in life, I think.  Things that bring both the joy and sorrows to us and the people we love.    I used to think that this meant that the world was full of good people and bad people, and there were enough bad ones that world was a pretty messed up place.  According to the Bible, in the end, the wheat is gathered in and the weeds are tossed onto the bonfire.   I knew where I wanted to be.  But Timothy, I’ve come to think that there is both wheat and weeds in me.  

I wish I could believe that I’ve been as good and beautiful a person as Arnold thinks I am.   But there have been times when my goodness has been tainted, like a cornfield infested with weeds.  For years I’ve been friends with Helen Sanderson, and though we’ve been in each other’s weddings and tended to each other’s children and worked with each other in the Ladies Improvement Society at the Methodist church, I can remember being jealous when she was asked to sing solos in the church choir, and looking down my nose at her frumpy clothes, and feeling secretly smug when she gained all that weight.   And though I’ve loved Arnold for almost 60 years, for a long time it was a selfish love.  When we got married, I can remember being  happy because he belonged to me and not somebody else.   And for years I’ve carried on a one-woman reclamation project to fix his flaws, and there are still a few things I’m working on.  Too often my loves have been on my own terms.  Even my love for God, Timothy, can you believe that?   My love for God has too often been about all the good things I’ve wanted him to do for me!

But in these past years I have felt some of these compulsions flying away, like a murmuration of starlings.  Some of my weeds have already gotten thrown into the fire, and what is left is the best and truest part of myself.   “Wholesome grain and pure.”   So I am truly grateful, this Thanksgiving, for the golden light that fills my life and encircles me like love itself.  I am thankful for the taste of cranberry relish and sweet potato casserole, for the aroma of turkey and the smell of your Uncle Arnold’s neck.  I am thankful for November, and the certainty of snow, and the whisper of wind in oak trees whose roots are deep in Iowa dirt.  I am thankful for coffee in the morning, and the rumble of a furnace, and slippers.   I am thankful for the old hymns I can sing by heart, and for old friends who can sing them with me, even when they sing badly.   I am thankful for stiff joints that remind me that I am alive, even after all these years, and that even with all the worn out and broken parts of me, I can still laugh.   I am thankful for Arnold and for Helen, that they are just the way they are even after all my efforts to fix them.  I am thankful that Harley Jacobsen’s pants did not fall off up there on the tower yesterday, and that someday he will remember the wondrous year of the starlings, and give thanks for it.  I am thankful that Harley is willing to climb that letter in spite of his fears, and I am thankful that after all these years I am less afraid of useless things, like what people think of me.   I am thankful that I am forgiven, that in spite of all my petty judgments and jealous thoughts there are still people who love me.  I am thankful for those bright spirits who will gather around our table whom I can only see in my memory, but who have given me a glimpse of the golden light into which I will walk when I die.    I am thankful for hope, that there will be a star shining over Blue Grass next week and forever.   I am thankful that I am just one little star in the darkness, and that when my light goes out the heavens will still be bright.

We will gather around our table next Thursday, and before your Uncle Arnold carves the turkey and Alice apologizes for the lumps in the gravy, we will stand and hold hands and give thanks for all these things.  And before I sit down to eat and taste my blessings, I intend to excuse myself for a minute and go out on the back porch with a handful of the bread crumbs left over from the stuffing, and fling it into the air as an offering to the starlings swirling over my head, as I murmur my own thanks for this harvest home.

Bless you, Timothy, in your Thanksgiving.   May there be stars and starlings over your head, and joy within.  Keep us in your prayers as we keep you in ours.

Love,