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  • Loosestrife
  • Evelyn Funda (bio)

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—That perches in the soul—And sings the tune without the words—And never stops—at all—

—Emily Dickinson

In January the fields of my family's farm in Idaho lie colorless and bare. This is arid country, so any cover of snow to offer modesty is rare. Instead, the land is exposed and raw, with the stubble of last year's crop looking as gray as a corpse.

I doubt my father ever saw it that way, though. For him, January meant a time to begin envisioning the hope of the next year, and the fields were the beckoning canvas of a summer that would paint itself green and then gold. January was only a sigh before the faultless expanse of tawny wheat, or the straight-backed dignity of corn, or the lush tumble of emerald clover with lavender blossoms.

I grew up fed on hope. Talk at dinner always turned to it, to the speculation about this year's crop: "If I can just get a decent yield this year," my father would begin as he pushed aside his dinner plate so he could scratch figures on a pad of paper with a stubby pencil—bushels per acre multiplied by his vision. "If the price will just hold," was always his amen. Such was the catechism of my childhood.

For years, my mother begged my father to retire from farming their small piece of ground outside of the rural town of Emmett. He was in his seventies and had begun to struggle for each breath, and, while his doctor called it asthma, Dad, who had smoked for forty years, was no doubt listening for the echo of emphysema that had claimed his father and his brother. Still, he worked like one possessed, coming in from the fields wheezing and dripping with sweat. My mother had long expressed her fear that she would "find you dead in a cornfield"—words that she spat at him [End Page 132] like a bitter gooseberry. It was about as self-revealing as she got, my stoic mother, and I couldn't help but picture it: Mother pacing in aggravation when he doesn't come in to eat on time, even after she honks the car horn—their usual signal—several times, cursing in her native Czech and muttering, "He knows damn good and well that lunch is at noon, damn him!" finding the pickup at the gate, trudging the pipeline back and forth, calling out into the thick stand of corn, sensing a stab of panic at her heart (should she call for the neighbors?), and finally, spotting out of the corner of her eye the telling glint of his sharpened shovel from deep in the field's darkness.

Until I had picked through the woven threads of her fear in this way, I had resisted, like Dad himself, the idea of him retiring once and for all. "What's he going to do, Mom?" I would argue. "He has no hobbies, other than a once a year fishing trip. He'll sit around the house watching tv and hounding you to play cards with him all day. It'll drive you nuts. Farming is just what he does. Let him do it."

I knew that crop prices hadn't been good in recent years. The previous crop had been cloverseed that had brought a good yield but no price. "The kind of price I used to get thirty or forty years ago," my father lamented during one of our Sunday afternoon phone calls. My mother's silence on the extension seemed ominous. Once you factored in the higher cost of spraying, property taxes, and harvesting, the bottom line was a loss. But I had willed myself to imagine that this loss was a few hundred dollars—worth it, I reasoned, because farming still occupied his mind and body in the way nothing else could. More than sixty years of working the farm had proven the veracity of the label under his 1941 high school yearbook picture: "Just a farmer at heart."

So when they came to Utah, where I live, for...

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