A Bushel’s Worth
An Ecobiography
Kayann Short
TORREY HOUSE PRESS, LLC
SALT LAKE CITY • TORREY
First Torrey House Press Edition, August 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Kayann Short
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.
Published by Torrey House Press, LLC
P.O. Box 750196
Torrey, Utah 84775 U.S.A.
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-937226-20-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012955570
Cover design by Jeffrey Fuller, Shelfish • www.shelfish.weebly.com
Stonebridge Farm photographs by Kayann Short
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (1949) 134w from “Good Oak.” By permission of Oxford University Press, USA.
Brief quotes from pp. 54, 354 from BLACKBERRY WINE by JOANNE HARRIS. COPYRIGHT© 2000 BY JOANNE HARRIS. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publisher.
For John, who cares what the harvest will bring.
Contents
The First Earth Day—And Still Counting
The Lay of the Land
Mountains to the West
Red, Red Barn
Horse Barn, Milk Barn
Toppings to Share
Stonebridge Pancakes
Silos
A Bushel’s Worth
Cooking for Threshers
Great Grandma Flora Smith’s World War II Victory Cake
Rockin’ the Harvest
The Seed Box
Appling
Putting By
Stonebridge Spiced Carnival Squash
What Goes Down
Seeds of Never-Seen Dreams
Keeping a Farm a Farm
Salvage
And the Earth Gives Again
A Bushel’s Worth
On our farm vacations, each day was an adventure afforded by nature and our grandparents’ hard work on the land.
In the rural economy of my childhood, everything had measure. After each meal at my grandparents’ farm, plates were scraped into a pail and the remnants topped with milk. Once the dishes were done, my grandmother and I walked to the barnyard to empty the pail into a bowl outside the barn door for the mother cat and the kittens she hid in the hay. Half-wild, they wouldn’t come out to eat until we returned to the farmhouse. Sometimes, glancing back, I’d catch a shimmer of quick cat fur as they darted under the door for their food. In this rural ritual, nothing—not the scraps left over from the table, not the steps to the barnyard and back—is wasted. Preserved even now by memory’s spare prose, in that crossing a trace of happiness remains.
What do you take from a place you love and what do you leave behind? I was born in North Dakota, but my family left for Colorado when I was four. Every summer throughout my childhood, we would “go home” for our vacation to visit my two sets of grandparents on their farms. As soon as school was out each June, my family would make the long day’s drive back in our station wagon, leaving before sunrise and stopping only for gas or a quick picnic lunch in a wind-blown park in Wyoming or South Dakota.
We were anxious to reach the Smith farm by early evening, where our cousins and aunts and uncles waited in the farm kitchen with our grandparents, watching out the big window facing the highway to see our dusty car turn down the gravel drive. After hugs and kisses in the farmyard, the adults went inside to ready our meal while Grandma led the children to the robin’s nest hidden in the long grass near the house, its blue eggs mirroring the sky against the yellow prairie. We looked for that nest each year, a sign that we, like the robin, had returned.
After my grandmother’s good supper, my sisters and brother and I would sit at the kitchen table long past our bedtime eating homemade toast with butter from my uncle’s creamery or a late night bowl of sugary cereal, the kind we never had at home. As we watched the northern sunlight darken slowly over the prairie, we listened to the adults share last year’s news until they noticed our dawdling and sent us to bed, even though the sun hadn’t fully set. That far north, the twilight lingers much longer over the prairie than it does in the Colorado mountains. As the oldest, I was cross about going to bed while the sky was still light, so I watched the sun slowly disappear through the window of my grandmother’s bedroom until it dropped behind the horizon and I dropped off to sleep. The farms meant robins’ nests and long grass and the hot sun that didn’t set until almost midnight, and I could hardly wait for school to end each year so we could go home again.
My parents had grown up on these farms and somehow the land and the rural lifestyle it supported seemed timeless. The farms provided a gathering place for our family and a playground for my cousins and siblings and me. Every day we would rush outside in the country air to hunt for the baby kittens in the barn, their newborn eyes still closed. Staying first at the Smith farm and then the Short, we would help our grandmothers gather eggs from the pecking chickens, watch our grandfathers milk cows, pick strawberries for shortcake, or ride in the hay wagon behind the tractor. Some summers, we stayed until the Fourth of July to set off fireworks, our grandfather keeping a watchful eye for the fire danger to the ripening fields. Each day was an adventure afforded by nature and our grandparents’ hard work on the land.
When relatives visited on Sundays, dinner seemed to last all day. Fresh and home-canned vegetables from my grandparents’ gardens always graced the table, along with