Mailboxes along the roads and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds often served as landmarks in rural Montana where I grew up. These landmarks told us where we were, and how far we had to go. Sometimes they signaled “home” and the end of the road. At other times, barely visible through swirling snow, they told us we had miles to go.
When I started compiling word pictures of these memories, I realized they were like those mailboxes and old barns–identifying places on the road. This one is about the business of harvests.
On the farm, harvest comes after a lot of work, after a lot of time, after a lot of growth. Any thaw that began before the end of March was a blessing. Since the ground might be frozen solid 3-4 feet down, this is going to take awhile. While waiting, he tended the machinery~~greasing, oiling and repairing things; getting fuel supplies and seed ready.
When the fields were dry enough he would break up the dirt with harrow or disk and then, whether there was adequate surface moisture or not, he would do the seeding–trusting for later rain if there hadn’t been early rain.
Some days or weeks later, depending on temperatures, he would kneel at the edge of the field in his pinstripe overalls and pinstripe cap and work his fingers through a handful of dirt, looking at the seeds that were put into that cold bed to see if new life has broken them open as the old husk died. There is satisfaction and encouragement in finding germination, but still No Rush To Harvest.
The complete greening of the fields is not yet, and the transformation of those slim green stalks into heavy amber waves is far in the future.
Weeks would go by with a variety of threats and blessings. Will those clouds bring rain or 
hail? Or will they just pass over and be on their way? Will this be a year remembered for grasshoppers or rust? Will the sun just bless and kiss the tender green shoots, or will it bake them and kill them?
He watches the crop and waits. He hopes for maturity and harvest~~but knows there’s no rushing it. He is at peace, knowing he has done everything he needed to, and now it’s out of his hands. (Not all farmers were at peace at this point; he was.)
Then one day, It’s Time To Get The Harvest In. The deliberate work and the patience, the willingness to wait until the harvest was ready is rewarded. Now there is the satisfaction of fat and full heads of wheat.
He knew all along, of course, that demanding early harvest would be sabotage. If he had refused to wait, there would have been no harvest at all. A failure to let the fruit develop in its own time destroys the harvest.
Now sometimes we had an Indian Summer. That’s just a spell of warm and dry weather following the first hard frost in late autumn. We loved a good Indian Summer–part of the treat lay in the fact that we knew the hard winter was surely on its way and Indian Summer was a gift, a temporary reprieve when the dry leaves out in the windbreak were crunchier than usual and the sky a brighter blue.
In checking the origins of the phrase, I learned that Indian summer is first found in Letters From an American Farmer, “a 1778 work by the French-American soldier turned farmer J. H. St. John de Crèvecoeur (a.k.a. Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur):
“Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer.
“It was well enough established as a phrase by 1834 for John Greenleaf Whittier to use the term that way, when in his poem Memories he wrote of ‘The Indian Summer of the heart!’. Thomas De Quincey, republished in Bentley’s Works of Thomas De Quincey, 1855, wrote:
“An Indian summer crept stealthily over his closing days.”
Whether we had an Indian Summer or not, by late October it was time to finish the last field task of the year. With rain in the north latitudes of the lower 48 being skimpy and undependable (never more than 12″ a year), the ground certainly could not be allowed to go into the winter months with any crust on the top or any large chunks of clumped dirt in it so the fields that had just been harvested now had to be plowed. The plowing also turned the stubble of the wheat or corn into the piteously poor soil to give it some help for nutrients and for holding moisture that might come.
Now this plowing would also bring to the surface more ancient rocks–baseball size to football size–rocks that would damage the spring-seeding machinery so rock-picking was part of the fall work as well. My older brothers were leaving home for military service by the time I was paying attention to seasonal events so I became accustomed to the sight of my Dad working alone at rock-picking, walking the length of the long strips of fields (1/2–3/4 mile long) behind the tractor which was pulling the stoneboat.
He would get the tractor lined up straight, put it in Super Low and then hop off as it started down the field. He would walk behind the driverless tractor picking up rocks and throwing them on
the stoneboat. Then at the far end, he would run to catch up, grab the edge of the fender and the seat and scramble back aboard to make the necessary U-turn and get headed back the other way.
Then with field work finally done, we could finally concentrate on the cattle, work with hay in the barns, begin to anticipate Thanksgiving, start baking for Christmas and settle down to the business of getting through winter. After Christmas, we are just 4 months from the point where this MBOB began when
in early spring the thaw would begin. Weeks later, the final snow would melt off and the mud would dry up so Dad could get in the fields.
It was the same process, year after year. Farmers didn’t hope for promotions. They hoped for survival and for a good crop. If they got it, they were grateful. If they did not get it? Well, that’s why everybody knew (and with absolutely no sense of irony used) the phrase “Next year will be better.” (That always was eventually true, you know.)
Each year’s late summer harvest in the northern plains states was evidence that the farmer had plowed the fields after the previous year’s harvest. Proverbs 20:4 lays out the work and the reward in these paraphrased words from The Living Bible, “If you won’t plow in the cold, you won’t eat at the harvest.”
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Let’s go a bit beyond “the word picture of the farmer plowing in the fall” and look at the thoughts that hang on the wall of his heart: what is it he knows that keeps him going?
There really is nothing very promising in the landscape of scattered snow flurries, early darkness and bird-stragglers flying south, but the farmer knew that if he didn’t plow in the cold of fall, the ground would not be able to retain moisture to nurture the anticipated harvest. So he plowed last year, and will plow this year, in blustery fall weather.
The farmers we knew never complained about plowing in the cold because they knew how reality worked. They accepted the need to simply be on whatever page reality told them they were on. When a dark picture showed up unexpectedly, or the page had a string of words so ominous that “nobody’d seen it this bad since ’34” they just had coffee together more often. Sometimes at the fence where their fields met. Sometimes around the kitchen table in the evening when one farm couple would go visit another farm couple. Sometimes at the gas station in town.
Each of them had, at one time or another, been humbled by reality when a harvest was lost. Each of them also had, at one time or another, been blessed and rewarded by reality when a record harvest was brought in.
They considered it neither confusing nor clever to simply farm with humility, trusting the Sovereign God for the harvest that would make all the work worth it. The farming was their responsibility. The harvest was His.
So this Mailboxes and Old Barns is dedicated to you who are plowing in the cold blustery winds that are sweeping our nation and threatening our Republic.
The harvest is worth it.
Plow on.
Wolverines!
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/indian-summer.html