And then
the grass and weeds were chopped and tilled, revealing rich brown soil. Then came the flooding. The cocoa powder soil was saturated. The water stood several inches deep. When the water cleared you could see snails
sliding across the surface of a mud like dark fudge. The fields stood flooded for quite a while,
some were even re-flooded, until it seemed they were meant for mosquito
breeding rather than rice growing.
But in
early summer the green shoots started to appear. Neat rows of the most vibrant green in
strange geometric patterns to maximize space in fields that weren’t perfectly
square. I happened to see the machine
used to plant the rice. It was a
strange, hunched looking insect that pulled the seedlings from a square patch
on its back with its many mandibles and shoved them into the soft mud behind
itself. I was fascinated as I watched it
crawl through the flooded field on tall, narrow wheels. Imagine the precision and gentleness needed
to transplant tender blades of grass without destroying them.
As the
days grew longer and hotter, the tiny green blades grew taller and
thicker. Soon the expanses of flooded fields
became oceans of green. During the day
egrets and herons stalked through the blades, like white ships lost in a
rippling green sea. At night frogs sang
from the swampy darkness. I watch the
growth of tadpoles to pollywogs to tiny frogs at the edges of the fields that I
passed on my way to word.
August
became September without any change in the temperature. But there was a change in the rice. Instead of blades reaching straight to the
sky, the heads were bent from the weight of young rice. As the days imperceptibly shortened, the tiny
grains of rice grew bigger. The heads
sagged, moving sluggishly in the gentle breeze where just months before they
had danced at the slightest whisper of wind.
Their color changed too. The
bright, spring green had darkened in the summer sun but now had an almost
yellow tint. It was almost harvest time.
Unlike
planting, which seemed to take months to get started, harvest moved
quickly. Whole swaths of plants
disappeared in a day. What had once been
a sea of green reaching to the horizon was rapidly falling to a very unique
combine. This machine was more like a
beetle, square and solid. Its mandibles,
sweeping the ground in front cut the rice in neat swaths. The cut plants were then carefully laid on
their side and fed up a conveyor to have their precious seeds removed. The now stripped blades were then deposited
behind the machine to be collected later.
The harvester moved in tight squares, working from the outside in, until
there was nothing left but straw yellowing in the fall sun and bleached stubble
protruding from the rich, brown earth like thin yellowish bones.
Now the
air was filled with the smell of fall.
The straw was gathered into clumps to dry. Hung or stacked, the soft smell of
decomposing plant material wafted from the fields - like the smell that clings
to your clothes after a day raking and playing in the leaf pile. Mixed in, and eventually overpowering, is the
smell of smoke. Haze clung to the fields
and valleys beyond as what is left from this year’s harvest is fired to return
nutrients to the soil. Despite the still
warm days, visions of smores, hot coco, and hay rides floated around my brain
as the smoke rose into the blue sky.
Finally,
the soil was tilled one last time, turning under what was left of the rice
plants, exposing the shallow, thick roots now reaching for the sky like sad,
tiny fingers in a sad juxtaposition. The
weeds will return in time. Perhaps there
will be snow to cover the naked fields.
Then it will all start again next year.
The only difference is, I won’t be here to watch the rice grow.
No comments:
Post a Comment