They say that on still summer nights in these parts, if you lay in bed just so, ear cocked and listening, you can hear the soybeans growing out in the milky moonlight. Under the stars, seas of green surge around island farmhouses, waves rolling across this countryside, growing, stretching, reaching.
The other night as I lay there, an expanse of window my celestial headboard, I tilt my head the way farmwives do, and listen to the fields. And in the night quiet, I am sure I hear it: the piercing stabs of countless billions of stylets, sucking the life sap out of our ocean of green.
The aphids have descended.
Monophagus, this species of aphid, aphis glycines, has an appetite for only one plant on the planet: soybeans. We have served up hundreds of acres for their ravenous, exclusive palate.
For the first time ever, these miniscule, pear-shaped insects in the hemiptera order were noted in the Midwest already in the early days of May. Usually the swimming holes have warmed from days, weeks, months of sun’s heat before the aphids take their long distance arch across the heavens to our feasting grounds here in the Great Lakes region of the spinning blue marble. This premature swarming is unheard of.
But ear close to the window pane, I can almost hear it: hundreds upon hundreds clinging like lice to each and every single stalk, piercing, sucking, secreting sugary waste from the two cornicles projecting from their abdomens. The waste left from the sap of our crop, our lifeblood. I feel weak, laying there awake, listening.
Come the fiery rim of light on the eastern horizon, I rise and walk the fields’ edge, bending over to lift backside of leaves. I peer close: the pale green sprinkling on each leaf now has a few membranous wings. Hope flutters.
Will they fly away?
The wind, searing and close, picks up, turning up the silvery underskirts of the maple leaves. The black underbelly of the pregnant clouds seem to scrape the trio of elevator legs of Boyd’s Grain Storage to the west as she blows in, low and heavy.
Farmer Husband steps out on to the porch. He’s come in from the barn to watch hope of rain coming in. I move from the field towards the porch, eyes and hope fixed on that horizon. Children spill out too, knowing. It is what farming families do: porch prayers, the impotent before the Omnipotent.
Gallons upon gallons of water poured down from the heavens would wash each of those 2.2 million stalks clean of the voracious aphids. If the drops fall on our fields.
We bow our heads. All that fills our ears is the sound of the wind rushing through, tugging those lumbering clouds behind. It sweeps our pleas up to the heights. Farmer Husband reaches across the porch swing to squeeze my hand. Yes, I know, always. He is good, regardless.
We can see the gray streams of rescue falling near the grain elevators. Less than a mile more now, a few more fields. The air hangs, electrified. A few splats of wet on the front walk’s cobblestone sends the children racing onto the lawn laughing, hands over heads, ready to praise and catch the drops of our deliverance.
And then the wind and the water hails down upon us. I push up against Farmer Hsuband’s side of the swing, hair and face misty wet. His face is turned towards the field, watching the rain drumming against those leaves.
Then, as quickly as she rushed in, she departs to the east.
As the patter fades away, we are still, Farmer Husband and I hanging on this swing. I turn to read his eyes, to read what I already know: it is not enough.
Farmer Husband’s rough fingers gently squeeze mine again, and, in the hollow of my stomach, I remember: He is always enough. Always.I step back into the kitchen to put a pot of breakfast porridge on the stove. He will restore the hope that the locusts — or aphids — eat up. In the morning light by the stove, if I wait and listen, I hear it too….
The steady beat of a heart that trusts.
Photos:
this week walking our soybean fields, checking the status of the aphids again this year
Text is a repost from 2007 archives… which we are living again this summer of 2009… and relearing the same lessons of His Sufficiency and always trust, always….
Share your thoughts…
To sign up for more quiet thoughts via email…
