Sufficiency of a Different Sort

I was hoeing the corn. I couldn’t help but remember the story of my paternal grandmother hoeing an entire field of corn with her four small children under age seven. She and my grandfather had decided that it would get them ahead to raise an extra hog that year, and an extra hog required an extra field of corn and the only field they had access to was a mile’s walk from their home. Since Dadaw worked 12 hours a day in the mines, that meant Mamaw had to do it.

And so, as my aunt, her eldest child, told it, Mamaw did her regular work that morning, then packed up a lunch and a bottle of milk, three hoes and four children and walked a mile. The two elder children were small enough that they hoed together in the same row while Mamaw took the next row. My dad was one of the two younger children who played on a blanket in the shade. They hoed, stopped, had lunch, hoed some more, walked back home and had supper on the table for Dadaw.

I was hoeing corn today and wondering if she was ever afraid like I am. Afraid that everything is going to come crashing down on my head. Again. Afraid that I won’t be able to live up to my own standards. Again. Afraid of the things I can’t possibly anticipate, that I won’t be ready for. Again. I look very much like her: the only thing she ever told me she was afraid of was the “sting of death”.

When my grandfather wanted a better paying job running a newfangled machine in the mines and they wouldn’t give him the job because he was too “little” and he left his family and went to West Virginia and got a job on that machine -- was he afraid? It worked -- he came back with experience and know-how and got that job. But to leave your family and not have a job lined up, it seems scary to me, for him and for her.

I do not believe my husband is ever scared. He scares me because he sees as clearly as I do how things could go wrong, but it scares me and it doesn’t him. I do not know how he does that. He says I am like Arthur Dent telling the psychiatrist that I just don’t think the universe likes me, and he is the psychiatrist telling me that everyone feels like that.

In my heart I experience life in that way wherein we are all the same. Not the same but one. One but without number. That we all have “light” within us and that light always recognizes itself.

In my head I experience that people are weak and cowardly and turn their back on you and hurt you if at all possible. Even when it doesn’t help them they’ll hurt you. Like it is a sport and they get points for inflicting pain.

I hoe corn and know again why I choose this life. Because life does not roll off my back, and hoeing corn only gives me blisters, not heartache. Because I can hoe corn, and trim the horse’s hooves, and milk the cow, and make the bread, even treat a snake-bitten dog -- and not once feel like I am not enough.