Fields of Green Turned Gold

Harvest is beautiful in photos.  It is orange moons and fainting sunsets.  It is also golden fields and green tractors; well, they should be green.

Unfortunately, harvest is not just the aesthetics of frost on fields.  Harvest is the frost on the truck windshield which you have to scrape off to drive to the load-out field before the first truck.

Harvest is chaos of noise from two tractors and an auger, and a truck driver holding a conversation with my dad above the rest of it.  But it is also rolling up polywire fence for the livestock and hearing the soft hum of the combine across the section.

Harvest is wearing four layers for the 6:30 AM truck, and a wearing a t-shirt by the 4:30 PM load.  It is keeping my hair up in a hat and still brushing out corn chaff that night.  The evil, pink glitter gets everywhere, including the pockets of nearly every sweatshirt I own.

Harvest is taking food out to the fields during the day, and eating supper late.  To make the first part of this operation work as smoothly as possible, we have a map on the wall by our fridge on which each field is numbered.  Snacks and coffee to field 14 it is.

Speaking of coffee, harvest is not the time to bring up the coffee consumption of those special few running the equipment.  The number of beat-up thermoses you've poured in the past twelve hours might be high, but I promise you- they don't care.  They're running on caffeine and ever-present fear of bad weather or breakdowns (because, you know, those two things can never come at the same time).
Give them coffee.
Say nothing.

Harvest transcends all other schedules.  For instance, I had homework to do this week, but I did none of it when we were loading trucks.  This makes for a slightly-stressed me, but I had the least amount of farm work in our family this fall, so I don't worry too much.  For the record, the homework is done, for now anyways.

Harvest, however, is not.

- Grace