My country cousins rang this week with their silo serenade-full of joybells of barley and wonderment of wheat and seasonal greetings.
The great moment had come when the procession of farm implements had left the field like Roman legions leaving the battle, the column of tractors, the triumphant trucks, the snouted harvesters that had nosed their grain into semi-trailers.
It was over. The paddocks, the patient paddocks, silent reapt and straw strewn; with sheep in an ecstacy of activity, searching for the barley lying in the stubble. It was all over bar the shouting and the recollecting.
The mighty machines were asleep now in their sheds.
Excalibur, the tractor, the tyred tyrannosaurus was in his huge metal shed again, the den where he’ll sleep until ploughing.
He never missed a beat, towing harvesters, shifting mini-silos, a mastodon of might, a diesel dinosaur. Moist dawns and searing sunsets, young farmers perching in his cabin, enveloped in his mechanical magic. Let him sleep then.
The phone gave a little crackle.
“Are you still there? You’ve had a book or something published,” my country cousins, giggled, “How much corn to the hectare?”
Laughter. Let them be, I thought. Last year it was so different. But the old Earth has revived again as it always does. The punishing drifts and the frail stalks and the drought were receding into time although the wounds would linger.
I knew that my country cousins had stood in the paddocks, just for a few moments with all the engines turned off and only the wind gusting over the granary of their dreams
It’s a wonderful thing about farming that, at the end of it when the crop’s in, you can look out on your land and think about what you did right and what you did wrong and whether you cropped too early or too late and then give praise because, in a wonderful way, it all came right in the end.
And the neighbour did the right thing too.
So you all stop your trucks and utilities and the old farm cars that live a dusty, oily life with eager dogs on the back seat. And everyone has a yarn.
A long, rambling recollecting yarn with much chin rubbing and head shaking and people sucking straws the way farmers have done for centuries.
When they had sickles and tied sheaves by hand there were straw suckers, farmers gathered to talk of harvest home.
This communion over the harvest is a kind of prayer for the land.
Before everyone rushes off to look at new machinery. Before they see about booking the beach house or testing the outboard of the trailer boat in a big waterfilled drum.
First, you must stand in your pad docks and give thanks, not consciously perhaps but, in that almost shy way that farmers have sometimes, that habit of kicking the soil with their boot in an affectionate salute to the stubbled dusty miracle under their feet; the soil, touched by sun, badgered by wind, nurtured by rain, with the seed and the coming to fruition until the army of machines and men marched over it and the grain flowed from one machine to another and from truck to silo and from silo to ships and then to foreign parts.
Finally everyone goes home; trucks and implements to the shed; dogs to their bones; cockies to their meal tables, sitting by the window where they can still see the dim outline of the paddocks in the twilight.
The harvest moon comes up big and yellow and dreams through the summer sky. Showers hiss and people sing under them and some old dog gives the moon a bit of a howl and gap toothed, serenades a canine sweet heart bone-languishing across the paddocks.
Harvest is home. The crops are bumpers.
“We guess you’ve been bulk handling the Christmas pudding,” my country cousins said. I blew them a fat, mince pie kiss by courtesy of Telecom.
Bless them and their harvest and the wide wonderful old land.
And while I’m about it, bless also plum puddings and mince pies!
Max Fatchen