I grew up on a farm in east central Kansas. One of my strongest memories is the farm community harvesting wheat over 60 years ago. In the 1940s and ’50s there were still working family farms there, with enough of them to do cooperative work. Here’s a haibun I wrote about the experience. (The last haiku has appeared in print.)

Wheat Harvest

The local farmers take turns harvesting each others’ wheat, working together until all the fields are cleared. One farmer owns a steam-powered thresher that sits in the farmyard. The wheat is cut with a binder—a machine that cuts the stalks close to the ground and binds them into bundles. A tractor pulls the binder — an old John Deere with metal rims instead of rubber tires. Farmers and hired hands collect the bundles and bring them to the thresher. A jeep (brought home from World War II) scoots back and forth between field and thresher, a flat wagon behind it to carry the bundles of wheat. Other farmers have teams of horses or mules to pull their loads.

The farmer whose field is being harvested provides the noon meal — or rather his wife does. The wives cook huge meals — fried chicken, mashed potatoes, fresh tomatoes, green beans, peas, roasting ears, iced tea, lemonade, fresh pie, home-made ice cream. Almost all the food comes from the farm itself, or neighboring farms, from hen-houses and garden patches tended by wives and children. Other wives may come to help cook, serve, and clean up. I play with the children too young to work. The elm trees shade the toy farms we lay out on the bare ground.

The threshing machine is large and gray. A steam-powered tractor runs the thresher as it separates the grain from the straw. The machine grumbles and belches as it separates wheat from chaff. The threshed grain is either stored on the farm to feed livestock or trucked to town and sold at the elevator. Engines groaning under two or three tons of wheat, the trucks rock and squeak as they leave the field and turn up the gravel road toward the state highway.

buried to the waist
in the wheat, the boy chews
a mouthful to gum

The town is small — about 500 people. A railroad runs through it; there are stockyards, a passenger depot, and loading facilities at the elevator. The elevator has a small office on one side with a soda cooler; my favorite is Nehi Orange. The silos for the grain are large cylinders; on one side of the elevator, a large building receives the grain trucks. The trucks are first weighed and then driven into the shadowy building, where the grain is dumped through a hatch. Behind worn wooden walls, augers spin, moving grain from bin to bin. Bits of twine and old Red Man packets litter the floor.

cobwebs
in the kitchen stove
abandoned farmhouse