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First Fruits Re: Psalms 20 "May he remember all your offerings.. . " (Psalm 20: 3a, RSV) Though this is a love story, it is not promiscuous. Quick exits from Cumberland on Friday evenings after father's work day said how much he loved the southern home six hours away, the red clay fields, the tobacco and sunshine ripening the summer air, breathing warmth toward winter. All this in his look, in his faraway eyes, that would fix the highway like some unthinkable thing that had to be crossed, black tar a blankness for spelling memories during the dark course of the evening drive. Starting early one autumn, we arrived at the ridge when daylight hung like scroll work on the old tobacco barn. Bats were beginning to loop, but white moths had sun still in the silk they left on my fingers. That was the first time I felt the greeting: something beyond hugs, kisses, warmth of words. An invitation 102 from Granddad to my mother to see his cucumber patch upslope from the barn. Above the old tobacco beds where young plants had been drawn to set the now maturing fields. She didn't have a sack, the car was empty of bucket, poke, and bag, nothing to gather cucumbers but the old tin can smelling of rust and emergency stops. It represented haste, not the destination. It would not do. So Mama took herself, dressed as she was, while Granddad guided her past decaying logs that once elevated cloth, cloth mesh like milkweed fluff over spring seedlings the size of ticks, but now lay like logs of crocodiles waiting in waist-high weeds, late summer's neglected jungle. Not quite sure, about the attraction of a rocky hillside, of weeds and waste, I watched them. Watched with shadows coming down. Granddad stooped and handed green sticks to Mama who bunched her skirt, gathered its pleats in one schooled hand, and filled the cloth with fruit. 103 They stumbled back to the car, tripping in morning glory vines overgrown fescue, lespedeza, Mama with her skirt, the circle of the earth, gathered to make a poke. Cucumbers tumbled free when she released the hem. We stacked them, plantbed logs in the floorboard of the Ford. Mama fussed about the marks where the fresh-plucked stems had bled against the cloth. Washings never released the stains of cucumbers, nor miles the sight of earth's long jewels brought to the car in a cotton dress, nor years the smile on Granddad's face. With twilight we drifted down the ridge side, under fireflies and starfields to the home house by the creek. Night sung, frogs sung, as we lugged love's labor, green cucumbers, to the kitchen table. Fields and houses, kitchen tables, change, weeds grow beyond bounds, she is older than he, and he is gone. But we talk of her father-in-law, my grandfather. Reared back beside her kitchen table, sipping coffee, I see his love of growing things, I hear her honor his life, 104 I see why I grapple with weeds through the sweat of summer, I see the circle of the earth gathered in a cotton dress. —Charles A. Swanson 105 ...

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