I just tell him straight out while we’re running water for the bath, waiting to wash all the field’s grime off the day and the skin.
“A day just doesn’t get any better for me.”
“Yeah?” The Farmer grins, a flash of white on a face of black.
“You could have taken me to a beach or a cottage or hiking, and none of that would have compared to today for me.”
“Shopping?” He’s pulling my leg now, eyes teasing mischief. He knows I hate shopping and I lean over, poke him in the ribs hard and he laughs harder. The tub’s nearly full.
I reach for the faucets. “It was just this perfect day. You teaching Levi how to run the tractor with the grain buggy…. And you getting to work with both your brother and Dad to take the wheat off the farm you grew up on… And me getting to watch the cousins up in the tractor together and three generations doing harvest. All of us! Together! And the way the whole day just seemed…. gold.”
I can’t stop smiling.
“Better than Paris? The Louvre? The Mona Lisa?” He’s pulling off his socks and they come off these puffballs of dirt and chaff and dust and he’s upping the ante now, going for broke.
“Oooooh…..” Has he got me? “I loved Paris….” I am remembering a Vermeer and the way the painted light fell across the canvas and the brushstrokes of a farm woman in a window framed by gold. The Eiffel tower lighting the night pitch. The vaulting echo of the Notre Dame.
“I don’t know… but I just might even take a day like today with all of you in the field, doing the harvest together…” I wink at him sitting on the edge of the tub.
He can’t stop smiling.
Bath finished, I’m bent over the tub, scrubbing the ring of the day’s memories away and he’s stretched out on our bed in the dark, clean and tired and done. And I look up, look out the window, look into the night. The barnyard light makes the soybean field a sea of silver leaves.
There’s a whole world out there. A big old world.
I don’t know if he’s sleeping or not, so I say it quiet, a whisper to me, to him, to all the world out the window.
“You happy?”
I guess he’s still awake because he murmurs the answer from the bedroom dark and I hear.
“Yeah…. happy. Aren’t we all blessed?”
I smile.
And in the black of the window, I catch the reflection.
Related:
A Day in the Life of A Farm Family: A Diary of Photos
Photos: one farm family bringing in the 2010 wheat harvest
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