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I was five or six.

It was about 8:00pm just outside Webster, Wisconsin. We were at my grandparent’s house. We had probably driven a couple hours from our home in New Hope, a suburb of Minneapolis.

I don’t much about arriving, about the conversations. My first clear memory of that evening is walking next to my Swedish grandfather toward the cornfield. While Grandma Larson was filling a pot with water, we were going to pick some fresh sweet corn. Just for me.

I don’t know how much we picked. I have a sense that it was just a couple ears. We went back to the house.

The water was boiling. The corn went into the pot. There was more conversation. I don’t know what I did.

My next image in my head from that night is me is sitting by myself at the table. There was a circular florescent light. There were white painted cupboards and a woodstove. There were four adults standing around chatting.

And me. By myself. At the table. Past bedtime. Eating field-fresh sweet corn.

It broke all the rules. But that night my parents let my grandpa decide to give me my favorite food.

They didn’t have much, my Swedish grandparents. My great-grandfather had come to homestead the land and build a house for his wife and youngest son. My grandfather was eleven when he came to this very land to see his father for the first time in a decade. These two men cleared the trees. They plowed the ground at first with horses. My grandparents raised one son and four daughters and some chickens and a couple of cows and grew corn and potatoes and hay.

The corn that I ate that night had been planted with a hand-held planter on land that had been plowed with a small tractor that had been cleared of trees with hand-powered saws.

But I didn’t know all the history that night. I just knew that the quiet man I respected had picked corn just for me.

I thought about all this as I was eating the last ear of corn the other night an hour after supper. Everyone was off doing the rest of life. I heated the ear of corn, covered it with butter, and munched my way through 45 years.

The little things you do for children? They matter.

And maybe all the work clearing the land is worth it.

by Jon Swanson

Photo graciously provided by the author, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved