Creative writing and rambling…
September 13, 2010
The Harvesters
On a steamy August day, the harvesters gather early in the morning. The thick heat is tangible, even at first light.
Threshing. Gathering, tying, spilling. Gathering, tying. Threshing.
A mother comes early and works late.
Children still sleeping when the fresh baked bread is left on the table and the door closes.
All the other harvesters break for their mid-day meal of cold porridge and day old bread.
They sit and talk with heavy voices, tired and weathered.
But there is still a familiarity that years bring. A glue of time lived together. Seasons pass, some for working, some for celebrating. But the mother does not know this gooey glue: the time aged voices.
She knows their sound, she has listened to them for years. But they do not know her sound.
The melodic flutter of her foreign accent.
She keeps her song in her heart and sings it to the wheat and to her babies in the dark.
Her song of life, of the stories she’s collected.
She drinks in the world and churns it into a sweet cream butter.
