The Faith of Sweet Corn

August is the shortest month of the year.
I know that, technically, it hath 31 days, but for me, the month always flies by so quickly that I can't trust the number of little boxes on the calendar grid. I love August. Usually the kids' camps and sports and classes have wound down so the days are less likely to be filled with activity. The days are still long enough to feel like they're bonus length. It's August when you make sure you do the summer activity you meant to get to in June and July--a picnic, a swim, a cookout, a boat ride, a visit to a favorite ice cream parlor, whatever you think of as a mandatory summer activity. Unlike some months (January, February...) that overstay their welcome, unlike the months that I'm glad to wave goodbye to, (March...) I'm always saddened when good old lazy August gives way to its brisk autumnal sibling, September.
August has a lot to recommend it, but I would love August for the sweet corn alone. I can never get enough of it. Buttered, salted and served steaming hot, it is the taste of the eighth month. Sweet corn is more than simply a vegetable; nothing else from the garden comes with this much personality. My favorite tasty hybrid is the regally named 'Silver Queen.'
Biting into the late summer pearls of juiciness transports me back to the summer dinners of my childhood, when my grandmothers would serve corn as the centerpiece of the meal, alongside the summer rubies--sliced home grown tomatoes and fresh watermelon. I remember turning the cornsilk into moustaches when my sister and I husked on the back porch. And don't all of us recall our sixth summer, when Mom or Dad had to cut the corn off the cob because of the universal no-front-teeth issue?
Every August, I make a near-daily run to a farmstand or grocery or farmers market to buy another half dozen green torpedoes. I take particular pleasure when I buy it from a farmer who sells the proud bounty of his cornfield out of the back of his pickup truck. In August, you can believe his hand-lettered sign that proudly proclaims "Local."
Perhaps sweet corn is SO sweet because the season is so short. Would we savor each milky kernel as much if we could indulge year round? Would it still be such a treat if the ears of August were available in April?
This year, on August first, my friend Josephine showed up with a brown paper grocery bag loaded with a lucious summer supper--pasta salad, home made cookies and, yes, ten ears of sweet corn, husked and ready to drop into boiling water. As she prepared this meal in HER kitchen, Josephine--who happens to be a reporter for the Star Tribune--could not have known that when we ate the meal, we would not be sitting in OUR kitchen. We consumed it--sadly, barely tasting it--while hunkered down in front of the TV in the basement.
As we watched the unimaginable, Josephine was covering it. She and I had been in the midst of conversation about my bald head when we my husband arrived home. He told us the incomprehensible news he had just heard on the radio. Josephine rushed from my house and proceeded directly to the site of the bridge collapse in downtown Minneapolis.
The disaster has consumed all of us for the better part of the past week. Like everyone, I have played back my hundreds? thousands? of trips across the span, including the last one. Five days before the collapse, I drove across the bridge with my two daughters at, oh, 6:05 p.m. while on my way to see 'Hairspray' at the St. Anthony Main movie theater. I tootled north over the bridge with no sense of impending doom--with no sense of anything, to tell the truth, except a slight annoyance that the narrowed lanes slowed my progress on the road.
I didn't realize, of course, that the Cosmic Clock of Doom was counting down to the bridge's demise. That, within the week, an international audience would watch in speechless horror as they took in the heart-stopping images of our beautiful river, the very birthplace of our city.
None of us will ever be able to look at this gorgeous gorge in the same way. Something has changed and can never change back.
I think we all feel betrayed by the disaster. We depended on this oft-travelled hybrid of bridge and highway. We seldom gave this particular piece of road a thought. It was there to serve us and it simply didn't occur to us that it could be sick. That it could be terminal. That it could die a terrible, tragic, crashing death.
The Bad Things we fear and worry about are seldom the Bad Things that happen.
It's the thing you don't see coming that gets you every time.
This summer, I see everything thought the lens of my breast cancer. Sorry, I know it's egocentric, I know it's absurd. I can't help it. As I have talked and listened and talked some more about the bridge, I can't help but connect the civic betrayal of the bridge disaster with the shock that I felt at my diagnosis.
I suppose we all fear cancer if we really stop and think about it. Until I saw that big blurry cloud on my mammogram, I had no sense that the cancer bell would ever toll for ME. My body was the bridge that I used and never thought about. It's job was to take me where I wanted to go. It honestly never occurred to me that my own infrastructure was vulnerable. Until it crashed on me.
I'm going to live, survive, thrive, of course. But only after experiencing the shock of my life.
Grief is at its sharpest when it involves losing something that you never thought you'd be without. Grief is loss--loss of a person, a relationship, a job. Loss of a piece of yourself.
I know so much more about this at the end of the summer than I did at the beginning.
Which brings me back to the beginning of this post.
Sweet corn.
I didn't savor the corn from the first of August. But I boiled a potful up for supper last night and it tasted good again. The family was crowded around the kitchen table for dinner, chatting a little bit, but mostly saying, "Pass the butter!" or "Push the salt back over here." Our mouths were full and so were our bellies.
Earlier in the day, I had stopped at a farmstand west of Minneapolis. I purchased corn picked earlier that morning--according to the farmer who picked it. I bought eight ears just yards from where the ground where they had started. One tiny kernel beget a stalk which beget the sweet golden meat of my dinner.
When you stop and think about it, that's a miracle.
August may never be the same for us. Something like our innocence went into the river this year.
But August still gives us her gifts. Go find the fresh local corn that is available for such a brief time. Buy and bite down. Taste and savor. Marvel at how, even in a drought year, sweet treasures can be coaxed from the dry ground.
When what we thought we could always count on changes or fools us, we need to seek out that which will never change.
Faith. Friends. Family.
And fresh local sweet corn.