Hi friend.

Nancy said that I should write about corn.

It used to be the only vegetable I’d eat. Corn on the cob and raw carrots. That’s still mostly true, only now corn isn’t a vegetable. It’s a grain. (Actually, it always was a grain).

But in addition to being a grain, corn on the cob is love.

Six decades ago, we drove into the driveway at my grandparent’s farm. I’m not sure whether we had just arrived to this farm near Webster, Wisconsin, from our home near Minneapolis, or whether we had come from the little trailer we had on the other side of the woods from their house.

I was only five or six.

I’m guessing I said something about wanting sweet corn. My grandmother put a pot of water heating on the wood stove. And my grandpa and I went to the field and picked an ear of corn. I’m guessing it was only one. I don’t remember anyone else eating any that night.

It was a fresh ear of corn just for me at bedtime from my grandpa.

I sat in the kitchen with the overhead fluorescent circle of light, at the little table where my grandparents ate. And I ate my ear of corn. I remember it being good. I actually remember it.

My grandpa didn’t talk a lot.

Instead, he did things. Like building the house my mom grew up in. And finding a pattern in the end of a birch log he’d cut, sanding and sealing it, and giving it to my mom.

We worry all the time about big things. Events, celebrations, expense.

But often, the things that we remember, and others will remember of us, are as small as an ear of corn on a summer night. Which came because of an old man’s ear attuned to loving his people.

And now I’ve got to go. Nancy is fixing corn for supper. She knows, too.

Jon